Found Among Lines

Random walks through books. Longer quotes than in rigonz@tumblr.

[foundamonglines-blog]

Any labor which accepts the competition with slave labor - is slave labor

Norbert Wiener ha sido uno de los padres fundadores de la computación moderna y esa disciplina a la que dieron nombre y que luego ha quedado diluida: la cibernética. Uno no deja de sorprenderse al leer que estudió con Hilbert, Hardy, Russell o Landau y ver la actividad intelectual que desarrolló. Ocurre que usamos la misma palabra (universidad) para realidades que, a lo que parece, no tienen nada que ver - salvo ocasionalmente compartir edificios. Preocupado por el futuro, Wiener puso a salvo su alma confiando en que los desarrollos tecnológicos, de por sí mismos, pudieran ser moralmente neutros. Copio unos párrafos al respecto de su libro Cybernetics (or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine), 1961, 2nd ed.

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Let me now come to another point which I believe to merit attention. It has long been clear to me that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performance of motors or solenoids. With the aid of strain gauges or similar agencies to read the performance of these motor organs and to report, to "feed back," to the central control system as an artificial kinesthetic sense, we are already in a position to construct artificial machines of almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard of importance for good and for evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the development of the technique of radar in the Second World War. I have said that this new development has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the "fifth freedom," that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary. Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present situation if I say that the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the "dark satanic mills," was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery. There is no rate of pay at which pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy. The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human value other than buying or selling. To arrive at this society, we need na good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle, which, if the best comes to the best, may be on the plane of ideas, and otherwise - who knows? I thus felt it my duty to pass on my information and understanding of the position to those who have an active interest in the conditions and the future of labor, that is, to the labor unions. I did manage to make contact with one or two persons high up in the C.I.O., and from them I received a very intelligent and sympathetic hearing. Further than these individuals, neither I nor any of them was able to go. It was their opinion, as it had been my previous observation and information, both in the United States and in England, that the labor unions and the labor movement are in the hands of a highly limited personnel, thoroughly well trained in the specialized problems of shop stewardship and disputes concerning wages and conditions of work, and totally unprepared to enter into the larger political, technical, sociological, and economic questions which concern the very existence of labor. The reasons for this are easy enough to see: the labor union official generally comes from the exacting life of a workman into the exacting life of an administrator without any opportunity for a broader training; and for those who have this training, a union career is not generally inviting; nor, quite naturally, are the unions receptive to such people. Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments. They belong to the age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the hands of the most irresponsible and most venal of our engineers. The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation. As we have seen, there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.

[foundamonglines-blog]

Here a sad story indeed must be told

Hace unos fines de semana estuve en un gran museo y no dejé de pasar por el departamento asirio. Recordé lo leído acerca de la otra cara de las expediciones arqueológicas (y los museos). Copio de Otto Neugebauer, The exact sciences in antiquity, 1969, 2nd ed.

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At this point it may be useful to insert a few general remarks about excavations and publication of texts because little is known about these problems outside the small circle of the initiated.

A modern excavation is a highly complex enterprise. A staff of architects, draftsmen, photographers, epigraphers, and philologists have to assist the archeologist in his field work. But this is only the first and easier phase of an excavation. The preservation of the ruin, the conservation of the objects found, and, most of all, the publication of the results, remains the final task for which the work in the field is only the preliminary step. Here a sad story indeed must be told. While the field work has been perfected to a very high standard during the last half century, the second part, the publication, has been neglected to such a degree that many excavations of Mesopotamian sites resulted only in a scientifically executed destruction of what was left still undestroyed after a few thousand years. The reasons for this fact are trivial. The time required for the publication of results is a multiple of the requirements for the field work. The available money is usually spent when a fraction of the original planned excavation has been completed, benefactors are hard to find to pay for many years of work without tangible or spectacular results, and.the scholars get interested in special aspects of the problem involved or go out for new material instead of performing the tedious work of publishing the thousands of details which the accidents of excavation have provided. The final result is not much different from the one obtained by the treasure-hunting attitude of the earliest excavators. Many an excavation, if not all, had to be stopped before completion or had to restrict itself from the very beginning to a few trenches crossing the ruin in the hope of getting a general insight into the character of the stratification. Then one or another promising building was investigated in greater detail. What resulted is a ruin left with deep scars, an easy prey for the natives to extract all exposed bricks, to tunnel for more without too many difficulties, and to have access to deeper layers and thus to continue the excavation" in their own fashion and for their own benefit. In this way the natives must have found thousands of tablets which were then sold at high prices by antiquities dealers to the very same museums which spent the initial money for the removal of many tons of sand and debris. Let me illustrate the effect upon the special studies under discussion here. Until 1951 not for a single astronomical or mathematical text was its provenance established by excavation. The only apparent exceptions are a number of multiplication tables from Nippur or Sippar but nobody knows where these texts were found in the ruins. Consequently it is, e. g., completely impossible to find out whether these texts came from a temple, a palace, a private house, etc. Not even the stratum is known to give us a more accurate date of the texts. In other words, if those texts, which were officially "excavated", would have been found by Arabs, we would be no worse off than we are now. But while the Arabs in their "clandestine" exploits dig only relatively small holes, a scientific excavation has destroyed beyond any hope all traces of the locality where the texts have been found. Thus we are left with the texts alone and must determine their origin from internal evidence, which is often very difficult to interpret. A long story could be told about the "methods" to obtain the needed information. Texts which for more than 50 years were lying in the basement of a great museum could be relatively dated from the newspaper in which they were wrapped. That gave a plausible date for the "expedition" which found the texts and hence the place from which they were excavated. A whole class of texts was identified as follows. A German expedition before 1914 had worked in the city of Uruk, a most important site because it contains structures which reach from the earliest periods down to Seleucid times. There the Germans must have found the debris of an archive of which, however, all the good tablets had been removed by the Arabs. These tablets finally found their way into the collections of Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, forming one of the most important groups of texts for the study of Seleucid astronomy. The Arabs were not interested in small fragments. These were left at the site and were then carefully sifted and photographed by the expedition. By courtesy of the Berlin Museum, I obtained prints of these photographs (cf. Pl. 6b) showing the fragments neatly arranged on a desk of the expedition. The records about the place where they were found were lost in the meantime. The fragments themselves had also been lost. By means of very extensive computation I succeeded, however, in establishing the relationship of these splinters to bigger pieces from the above-mentioned museums. Thus it became possible to restore whole tablets, the parts of which are now on different sides of the Atlantic. Finally, the small fragments themselves were rediscovered in Istanbul. But the main question of their accurate provenance remains unanswerable. The Mesopotamian soil has preserved tablets for thousands of years. This will not be the case in our climate. Many tablets are encrusted with salts (cf. Pl. 9a left and photograph which shows incrustations along the crack; the right-hand photograph gives the same tablet after cleaning). A change in moisture produces crystals which break the surface of the tablets, thus rapidly obliterating the writing. I have seen "tablets" which consisted of dust only, carefully kept in showcases. To prevent this, tablets must be slowly baked at high temperature and thereafter soaked to remove salts. But only great museums possess the necessary equipment and experienced staffs, not to mention the fact that these methods of conservation were often kept as museum secrets. Many thousands of tablets have been acquired at high cost by big and small collections only to be destroyed without ever being read or recorded in any way. The publication of tablets is a difficult task in itself. First of all, one must find the texts which concern the specific field in question. This is by no means trivial. Only minute fractions of the holdings of collections are catalogued. And several of the few existing rudimentary catalogues are carefully secluded from any outside use. I would be surprised if a tenth of all tablets in museums have ever been identified in any kind of catalogue. The task of excavating the source material in museums is of much greater urgency than the accumulation of new uncounted thousands of texts on top of the never investigated previous thousands. I have no official records of expenditures for excavations at my disposal, but figures mentioned in the press show that a preliminary excavation in one season costs about as much as the salary of an Assyriologist for 12 or 15 years. And the result of every such dig is frequently many more tablets than can be handled by one scholar in his lifetime. There exists no simple method of publication. Photographs alone are in the majority of cases not sufficient, even if their cost were not prohibitive. Tablets are often inscribed not only on both sides but also on the edges. Only multiple photographs taken with variable directions of light would suffice. Thus cost and actual need have resulted in the practice of hand copies. Many different styles of copying were developed by individual scholars, varying between an almost schematic reproduction of the signs to a minute reproduction of details. The reader may get an impression of this situation from pls. g and g which show an ephemeris for Saturn (Seleucid period) and an Old Babylonian mathematical text in hand copies and photographs. The ideal method of publication would be, of course, direct copying from the text. In practice this is often excluded by the scattering of directly related material all over the world. Even with great experience a text cannot be correctly copied without an understanding of its contents. Practically no text falls at the first attempt. Thus repeated collation, joining with other fragments, and comparison with other texts are needed. It requires years of work before a small group of a few hundred tablets is adequately published. And no publication is "final”. Invariably a fresh mind will find the solution of a puzzle which escaped the editor, however obvious it might seem after.

[foundamonglines-blog]

Belleza maculada - Alkionai hémerai

Hace muchos años, por las fechas en que el Marqués de Tamarón publicaba su Belleza maculada, apareció este poema de Sánchez Ferlosio, también en el ABC que D. Rafael fustigaba. Entre papeles ha reaparecido hace poco y estas páginas se merecen su inclusión.

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Cielo desgarradoramente azul

para el recuerdo de los días alegres:

azul testigo del azul perdido

de los azules días del cormorán, 

todos ayeres.

Bajamos por escabrosas escombreras

hacia los ríos parados y podridos,

perdiendo hasta el ayer: los días del alción

en la sonrisa de los hijos muertos.

La mar se vuelve negra,

se muere el cormorán,

¿y quién hará el azul, quién hará el día,

quién hará el ayer?

Tiempo apresado en el futuro escrito

del libro encalendado e idumarcial,

sin todavía.

Tiempo forjado en hierro de trofeo

y en bronce ecuestre fundido y perpetuado,

y bruñidas de historia las medallas

de las edades enfuturecidas

blanquean rojos cruores

de antiguas sañas en cándido alabastro:

peer en botija para que retumbe,

para que otumbe y para que lepante.

El calendario trae el tiempo ya apagado,

exorcizado, amortizado, reinvertido

en valores de viuda, no temáis:

toda zozobra anticipadamente

ha sido degollada

por Herodes el Grande, por Futuro Magno:

Ne redeant Saturnia regna!

Clavada la vertical del fiel de la balanza,

ventura y desventura, cada una en su platillo,

pesarán para siempre exactamente igual.

Némesis protectora y vigilante,

cascando de un mismo golpe el uno contra el otro

sus blandos cráneos de recién nacido,

cuidará de matar cada mañana

la desesperación y la esperanza.