Shiny
This is an elegant and beautiful example of the kind of thing Wired was talking about in the article I mentioned earlier. Artist Todd Falkowsky has processed thousands of photographs of all the Canadian capital cities into the three most predominant colours present in each.
It’s interesting, and a sincerely impressive feat of applying technology to art and culture, and there’s not much else to it. If you’re from TO, you might recognize the cherry red of the TTC in its palette: but only if you access a preexisting model of information, boo.
Lots of compelling data, zero meaningful content. I’m being impetuous, I realize, but I’m a politics student. It is extremely cool.
What of Libertarians?
This amuses me immensely. Conservatism as a psychological buffer! Silly conservatives, the state of Canadian politics, among other things, makes perfect sense now. Be sure to hit the teensy audio player at the top of the article, I missed it the first time.
It’s things like this that make me adore Scientific American.
Them’s fightin’ words
I’ve been reading Wired magazine’s Top Stories feed for about six months now, and while it’s always been concerned with the intersection of technology, politics and culture, I’ve never actually sat down with a proper article before. I’m using my powers of intuition to their absolute limits here, but I’m sensing that the editors have a penchant for shit-disturbing. I admire that, I’ve always been attracted to the radical periphery of discussions, particularly as they pertain to such geeky topics as technoutopianism and futurology.
While I’d like to say, in philosophical terms I appreciate the role which radicalism takes in balancing out the Luddite/conservative element I perceive as commonplace and oppressive in my day to day life, and I do, the mundane truth of it is I find the dreamers to be awesome.
Wired published most of their newest issue on the web yesterday. While I’m comfortable with the lads at the mag gleefully flogging the Environmentalist status quo, among other suitably anti-PC stances, something is rotten about their angle on the “Petabyte age”, or at least Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory and its notion of the end of scientific theory.
I get that journalists are in the business of attempting to be the first one to say “I fucking called it”, a practice, I’m sure, involving scores of cloaked and hooded men whispering over the light of guttering candles, the act of naming the stuff of distant threads of time ushering dark powers to whichever thrall is blessed by being the first. But this is taking things a bit far, somewhere between the reasonable “we are headed toward a paperless society” and the “humans will marry robots by the year 2050”. The article itself is a great read, extremely well written while raising compelling points, but there’s a limit to how well one can stomach an article subtitled “…Scientific Method Obsolete”.
The article itself is a great read, but the thrust of it is this: the ever advancing computational strength available in the modern age has begun to redefine not simply how we collect data – about everything and anything – but also how and what we learn. Scientific models in all fields are always wrong, hence why they’re constantly modified and updated, and thus the why of understanding phenomenon can be discarded in favour of increasingly rich volumes of what is.
The colossal elephant in the room, however, is the idea that we can excise meaning from information and still learn from it. While the author is careful to focus his parlance on the extinction of models from scientific theory, I find it difficult to separate this from the fact of meaning. How do we understand the Theory of Evolution without any underlying model? We may collect volumes of data to perceive that species change over sequential generations, but what do we understand if our inquiry exists wholly within this step?
This amounts to an assertion that interpretation can be replaced by pure mathematics.
The author points to a biologist, one J. Craig Venter, as the “best practical example” of what he’s describing as the future of science. It’s not my place to criticize Venter or his work, but I take issue with dubbing his method the future of scientific inquiry. The article openly admits that where Venter has used cutting edge Petabyte style technology to discover scores of unique and previously unknown microorganisms, he knows precious little about them beyond the statistical fact of their existence. Consequently, that is all his method, in and of itself, has contributed to the body of science. This is a complex matter, but I beg the question: what have we learned from this?
I find that there is palpable and uncomfortable void in answer to that question. In the author’s own words “It’s just data.” Necessary, but not sufficient.
BIT PART 