Analog by Night

Divorce is a sound that is born in clip.

I remember these girls (and guy) opening for REO Speedwagon in 86 at the Topanga Valley Convention Center. I think it was the “What would JCPenny Do?” tour, but then again it could have been some sort of Sub-Humane Society benefit. I don’t know, I just remember seeing one of them collapse from the heat during “Joanie’s Sorry (and Chachi cried)” before falling asleep on my Aunt Bakie’s blanket.

I remember my tiny sunburned belly full of homemade apple juice, and the slow doping affect of Oscar Mayall (organic varient) bologna hugged between two sugary slices of rainbow family walnut bread. I nearly choked on the smell of Californian sweat wafting from my Uncle Harold’s armpits. It smelled of sandalwood and alfalfa, and was the push to sleep, the push to forget.

Thanks to the band for providing my young guardians the stage and poetic preamble to the dissent that would later become a two year divorce. They had their divorce, and of course I began mine. I divorced my family and I divorced the twin boys I used to ride bikes with down Strawberry Lane in the depressed ‘burb I was born in four miles outside of town.

How can you be in love with two sets of plain brown eyes? The eyes you know are open when your feet accidentally touch during a sleep over. How can you not weep with joy after the hand connected to those eyes brashly jumps across the table to smear jelly across your face only to be tasted itself by tremulant lips? How can you not remember the light red crease in the olive skin set in the waist by elastic shorts. A crease you might get a peek at everytime you jumped on the trampoline together. I divorced those boys, because the twinness of my gender and my feelings pushed the sound of my beating heart into clip.

That summer, that show, those three marginally coordinated girls and the facetious absent meanderings of the “Teens” keyboardist, foggily bound my memory. A memory of divorce, a memory of the kind of separation that would never end for me.

Note: I realize that this analysis is deeply premature, but the thought struck me and I wanted to roll with it at the moment.

So, I’m reading the most delightfully nerdy and religious and thick essay I’ve read in a while. It’s actually only a few days old. Which belies that I am actually several months in the the weeds.” It is eloquently titled: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One – W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004. I’m on section 2.2.1, a short and tight section on the meaning and principle of URI’s. The document is constructed brilliantly like a study sheet replete with blocked of factoids like:

Constraint: URIs Identify a Single Resource :Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.

So I pour over that for a minute. It tastes like a little commandment. I like it. It feels comforting like a big hand on your shoulder turning you away from the wide and sinful path. Do this!

Of course the meat of the statement is about singularity. URIs Identify a Single Resource They admit it is a constraint right off. Ok, I’m ready. And they sandwich, they HIDE, that harshly impossible truth between a warning, and a statement which is emasculated in it’s ambiguity. The last bit, (Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.) is like some pale, limp identity statement. A is not B. Thanks.

So.. um… what about streams? Dynamic content? blogs? Clearly the nature of the modern web development and culture is dynamic. Not static; it has to change! That last statement allows dynamic resources to satisfy it by not really addressing the dimension of time. By being somewhat one dimensional. But the middle statement really says something.

Let me be more clear, that this little signpost factoid is not just a summation of the elaborated principle that precedes it in the paper, but actually a kind of argument itself.

Here’s the breakdown:

1. Constraint:
2. URIs Identify a Single Resource
3. Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources

One and two are inline, cojoining them. But one has to acknowledge that they are separated by a colon. Which indicates hierarchy. It’s necessary punctuation, but it is not insignificant. That’s why it serves to separate them and analyze the effect of that hierarchization. The effect is that of directive. Usage of the word in it’s position serves to contain and soften the effect of the summarization.

Seriously it’s the summarized, framed and colored little axiom that you’re really going to remember anyway. So they tell you early on that these will be prefaced and broken into groups. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly conservative and well structured document, but I think subtextual analysis yields a character which is worth remarking. Those groups are: Principle, Good Practice notes, and Contstraint. Their intended (read ‘constructed’) meaning is detailed here: 1.1.3. Principles, Constraints, and Good Practice Notes.

Ok, back to the point of the post. The question is presented again: How can a URI satisfy that second part? The subtitle, “URIs Identify a single resource,” asks for singularity and that sounds static to me. This forces “resource” into a broader, more open meaning which has to include streams, dynamic pages and even apps, which change. A message is singular, and the word resource broadens the declaration to suggest a ‘place’ or space for multiple messages.

Consider a blog. On it’s first day it may contain one message, one post, one identifiable, static, element, and the next day it may contain a second. At any given examination the total surveyable message has changed. The messages are multiplicitous, and they utility exists for this purpose. The home pages of the past never implied any tendency one way or the other. They were free to be homesteads, and still are, or to be agoras, where an albeit circuitous labyrinth of indentifiable yet static messages may exist. But the blog, and any other resource delivered by PHP, CGI, ASP, or any other scripting/dynamic system force the definition of URI into a broader flora of interfaces with multiple message capability.

So the qualifiers “Identify” and “single” resource create an ideological conflict of arbitrarity which of course is characteristic of the web we experience. It is a space, and we represent it that way in our common language. We don’t say “turn to this section of the web” we say “go to this website” Spatial, it’s spatial. Home, city, highway, are not resources nor does it make much sense to describe them as single.

We are deeply encouraged by our logical history to categorize our world in terms of items, but comeon, when we look at anything long enough we come to realize that items are simply the borders of another collection of smaller items. We go back and forth from describing our world as things and spaces where things are. The web, cyberspace, you choose, but to be honest to what we know now, and with credit to this new morphological perspective of reality, our world (especially our informational world) is more accurately described in four dimensions or more rather than three. The willingness to extend our definitions into multidimensionality (look at the usage of the word ‘orthogonal’) requires that we acknowledge two things about our knowledge:

1. Boundaries are arbitrary, and serve a basic need however incomplete
2. Meaning crosses boundaries, ie meaning changes; contigent it’s presentation

We have been in period for quite sometime, of imposing this layered view of reality. Whether you see a diamond, or a collection of carbon molecules, or a very rare event points explicitly to a world-view. The ‘rare event’ model includes all four dimensions, and therefore provides the more complete model.

Perhaps the LIS oriented documentophiles should reconsider the language of these documents towards a more spatial ideology. This observation and subsequent suggestion extends from the motivation towards the more complete model, however evolving this model is. Admittedly a model that includes the idea of recurrence of form would be even more progressive, but I do not think we are ideologically quite prepared to admit the reality of recurrence for lack of historical documentation of it definitively. Essentially this is a suggested modernization of terminology to reflect more accurately the world we experience and merely recalls other phenomenological, semiotic, and epistemological arguments.

To conclude, if our worldview, and the surge of temporality inclusive terminology into the common set of reality qualifiers is sufficient for the modern discussion concerning materials, society and innovation, it should extend to the discussion and definitions, however suggestive or declarative, of our informational experience as well.

Note: I realize that this analysis is deeply premature, but the thought struck me and I wanted to roll with it at the moment.

So, I’m reading the most delightfully nerdy and religious and thick essay I’ve read in a while. It’s actually only a few days old. Which belies that I am actually several months in the the weeds.” It is eloquently titled: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One – W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004. I’m on section 2.2.1, a short and tight section on the meaning and principle of URI’s. The document is constructed brilliantly like a study sheet replete with blocked of factoids like:

Constraint: URIs Identify a Single Resource :Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.

So I pour over that for a minute. It tastes like a little commandment. I like it. It feels comforting like a big hand on your shoulder turning you away from the wide and sinful path. Do this!

Of course the meat of the statement is about singularity. URIs Identify a Single Resource They admit it is a constraint right off. Ok, I’m ready. And they sandwich, they HIDE, that harshly impossible truth between a warning, and a statement which is emasculated in it’s ambiguity. The last bit, (Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources.) is like some pale, limp identity statement. A is not B. Thanks.

So.. um… what about streams? Dynamic content? blogs? Clearly the nature of the modern web development and culture is dynamic. Not static; it has to change! That last statement allows dynamic resources to satisfy it by not really addressing the dimension of time. By being somewhat one dimensional. But the middle statement really says something.

Let me be more clear, that this little signpost factoid is not just a summation of the elaborated principle that precedes it in the paper, but actually a kind of argument itself.

Here’s the breakdown:

1. Constraint:
2. URIs Identify a Single Resource
3. Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources

One and two are inline, cojoining them. But one has to acknowledge that they are separated by a colon. Which indicates hierarchy. It’s necessary punctuation, but it is not insignificant. That’s why it serves to separate them and analyze the effect of that hierarchization. The effect is that of directive. Usage of the word in it’s position serves to contain and soften the effect of the summarization.

Seriously it’s the summarized, framed and colored little axiom that you’re really going to remember anyway. So they tell you early on that these will be prefaced and broken into groups. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an incredibly conservative and well structured document, but I think subtextual analysis yields a character which is worth remarking. Those groups are: Principle, Good Practice notes, and Contstraint. Their intended (read ‘constructed’) meaning is detailed here: 1.1.3. Principles, Constraints, and Good Practice Notes.

Ok, back to the point of the post. The question is presented again: How can a URI satisfy that second part? The subtitle, “URIs Identify a single resource,” asks for singularity and that sounds static to me. This forces “resource” into a broader, more open meaning which has to include streams, dynamic pages and even apps, which change. A message is singular, and the word resource broadens the declaration to suggest a ‘place’ or space for multiple messages.

Consider a blog. On it’s first day it may contain one message, one post, one identifiable, static, element, and the next day it may contain a second. At any given examination the total surveyable message has changed. The messages are multiplicitous, and they utility exists for this purpose. The home pages of the past never implied any tendency one way or the other. They were free to be homesteads, and still are, or to be agoras, where an albeit circuitous labyrinth of indentifiable yet static messages may exist. But the blog, and any other resource delivered by PHP, CGI, ASP, or any other scripting/dynamic system force the definition of URI into a broader flora of interfaces with multiple message capability.

So the qualifiers “Identify” and “single” resource create an ideological conflict of arbitrarity which of course is characteristic of the web we experience. It is a space, and we represent it that way in our common language. We don’t say “turn to this section of the web” we say “go to this website” Spatial, it’s spatial. Home, city, highway, are not resources nor does it make much sense to describe them as single.

We are deeply encouraged by our logical history to categorize our world in terms of items, but comeon, when we look at anything long enough we come to realize that items are simply the borders of another collection of smaller items. We go back and forth from describing our world as things and spaces where things are. The web, cyberspace, you choose, but to be honest to what we know now, and with credit to this new morphological perspective of reality, our world (especially our informational world) is more accurately described in four dimensions or more rather than three. The willingness to extend our definitions into multidimensionality (look at the usage of the word ‘orthogonal’) requires that we acknowledge two things about our knowledge:

1. Boundaries are arbitrary, and serve a basic need however incomplete
2. Meaning crosses boundaries, ie meaning changes; contigent it’s presentation

We have been in period for quite sometime, of imposing this layered view of reality. Whether you see a diamond, or a collection of carbon molecules, or a very rare event points explicitly to a world-view. The ‘rare event’ model includes all four dimensions, and therefore provides the more complete model.

Perhaps the LIS oriented documentophiles should reconsider the language of these documents towards a more spatial ideology. This observation and subsequent suggestion extends from the motivation towards the more complete model, however evolving this model is. Admittedly a model that includes the idea of recurrence of form would be even more progressive, but I do not think we are ideologically quite prepared to admit the reality of recurrence for lack of historical documentation of it definitively. Essentially this is a suggested modernization of terminology to reflect more accurately the world we experience and merely recalls other phenomenological, semiotic, and epistemological arguments.

To conclude, if our worldview, and the surge of temporality inclusive terminology into the common set of reality qualifiers is sufficient for the modern discussion concerning materials, society and innovation, it should extend to the discussion and definitions, however suggestive or declarative, of our informational experience as well.

I was bored at home and very cold. Apparently, days before I left for KY, the heating unit stopped working. Whether this disabling was due to the lack of fuel or some yet undiagnosed electrical failure is neither here nor there, beyond prefacing the note that it is still very cold in the apartment, and further, that cold was the catalyst to an early departure. The sufficient origin of a hasty exit was an earlier phone call to Quinn, and, to complete the trio of reasons, the cold and boredom of home.

So I step outside to start the car. » Read the rest of this entry «