Month: April 2024

Another Other.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I came across something in the vein of ‘others’ yesterday when I was researching ‘TikTok, History and Issues‘.

It was in ‘Young Americans are defending the U.S. after TikTok videos criticizing it went viral‘ (emphasis mine):

“…Shami, who grew up in a multi-language household with a Syrian father and Irish-Catholic mother, said she often feels she’s labeled as “other” because she’s an American who wears hijab. She said Sara Falcon’s videos struck a nerve with her because they played into the idea that the U.S. looks, acts and speaks exclusively one way.

“My grandparents raised cows and corn,” Shami said. “I don’t know how much more American you can get.”…”

So this is likely an example of another ‘other‘. That would be about the only commonality I would have with her, but that’s the beauty of being an ‘other’. She’s multicultural, clearly. I don’t know that I agree with her take on things in that article since in my lifetime it’s been black or white in the United States.

She must have a very interesting perspective on things. We all do, with our own mixes of identities and cultures, lacking the monotone of the pseudo-science of race that racism is built on.

I imagine she might be asked “Where are you from” a lot when she meets new people. Well, she’s clearly from the United States. What more has to be said?

‘Running Water’

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

This morning I woke up with a question: Why do we say that water runs, but it never walks or crawls? Instead it runs slowly, or it drips?

It ends up this is a peculiarity of English. In researching this, Merriam-Webster surprisingly has ‘running water’ as a noun. It’s two words, an adjective and a noun, but they went with making it a noun which demonstrates how steeped it has become in the English language. It also states that the first use of it was in 1856.

It doesn’t say where. Well, how do we know that then? To quote Wikipedia, “Citation Needed“.

I got this far with Perplexity.AI, which I use sometimes for research – I’m not paying for it (yet? $20 a month is steep). Since I had a hint that it was considered a noun, I checked Etymonline and found nothing of use there.

When I checked Oxford English Dictionary about ‘running water’, it claimed that the earliest known use of the phrase was in the Old English period, before 1150. That’s about 700 years earlier than Merriam-Webster claimed. Oxford offered to give me the etymology, if only I subscribed. I did try registering to see how much that would cost, but those folks in Oxford had other plans.

I’m not sure how I acted suspiciously. Maybe there is a conspiracy about ‘running water’ – a coverup? I sincerely doubt that.

Paywalling the source of running water is… mildly amusing. They dammed the flow of information. So punny.

I ended up looking up the Old English etymology, and ended up with ‘ea‘.

So, in all of this, I haven’t really answered the question which is dissatisfying. It’s a simple enough question, one that I have thought about off and on for about half a century. Perplexity.AI couldn’t find it because humans who wrote for websites didn’t write it, or paywalled the answer.

It’s just another English oddity. Remember that the next time you run past a dripping faucet, or are running next to running water.

Meanwhile, electricity flows, but motors run. Go figure.

If anyone has answers, I’d love to hear what they are. If you found this trying to research it, hopefully more content can be found on it when you are looking – please let me know in a comment.

Almost A Month of Mastodon: Thumbs Up!

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

On April 1st I joined Mastodon, eschewing centralized social media networks because I felt like an experiment rather than a participant.

My experience so far has been great. I have some followers, not a lot, and I follow about twice as many as I follow (a good metric, I think). I interact with smart people, some who know more than me, some who know less, but everyone’s pretty polite.

It’s a sharp contrast to the other social networks I’ve been on – it actually reminds me of the good old days of the BBS systems, almost as if a few of us would form a party and go play D&D.

Sure, you have some annoying people now and then, but that’s life.

Centralized Social Networks: Blech.

Being away from the centralized social networks has given me perspective. In hindsight, this is what I saw:

Algorithms seemed to have washed the nutrients from my news feeds, instead pushing polarizing posts and spammy sales messages into my eyeballs. It was like a roundabout of billboards that I couldn’t get off – and what I did add to the networks was either not seen or interacted with.

On Facebook, with 1,250 connections, all of them felt distant, removed – not the flesh and blood people that I met, or the intellectually interesting that I had found. My newsfeed was repulsive.

“Hate Israel! Hate Hamas! Hate Russia! Hate Ukraine! Hate Republicans! Hate Democrats! Hate this one! Hate that one! Buy this! Buy that! Buy THIS AND THAT!”

Man, that’s tiresome. Hate takes a lot of energy and usually requires the suspension of the intellect in and an over-exuberance of negative emotion. I’m just not over-exuberant. To me it all looked like a litter box – and made me come to the understanding that walled gardens become litterbox prisons.

LinkedIn is pretty much a human caterpillar of professional brown-nosing. Everyone’s so worried about what a potential employer might think that they won’t rock the boat. They just want to be seen in a positive light, and so that network has become a beacon of bullshit as everyone’s interviewing and it’s a competition to be the most politically correct while maintaining some facade of professionalism all the time. It’s like being at an interview that never ends. It’s terrible, and oh- by the way – people always want to sell you stuff there too. Nobody cares what you can do, really, and the headhunters are more just about collecting skulls to make their bones. And Microsoft (LinkedIn) is constantly asking you to upgrade your subscription so that it can find you a job you’ll likely be unhappy with – otherwise they wouldn’t make money when you go back on bended knee.

At least in psychiatric wards, they give you drugs so you don’t have to experience the other inmates, and in that regard that’s what I believe social media networks largely do.

Twitter? Never really cared about it because I foresaw the trusted sources issue a year before the company even formed. People got into it for various reasons with no exit strategy, as most of us did with social media networks. TikTok I never got into, I don’t even have an account – it’s bad enough I was handing my likes and habits to Big Tech in the U.S., which because of FISA is a grey area of government – why on Earth would I want to hand more information to another government?

Meanwhile, On Mastodon…

I started off by following hashtags I’m interested in, and interacting with other people. 99% of it has been really good, thoughtful, and sometimes challenging in good ways – new perspectives to explore, new trains of thought to consider, new… well, new! Yet that was just the first week, and like a car, you really don’t know how well things are working until you lose the new car smell.

There’s an intellectual freedom I found there that was lost on other social media networks – the Fediverse has it’s own wonkiness, and there are criticisms of Mastodon by longer time users that I don’t understand yet. That’s fine. Most of the issues I see with people on Mastodon is that they want the same confirmation biases fed that they had fed on centralized social networks.

One person wrote today of the centralized networks, “where friends are frictionless and things are predictable.” That sounds a lot like an echo chamber to me, an algorithmic ant mill. I don’t like watching NASCAR because it’s a boring track, I never would have wanted to drive in NASCAR because it’s a boring track, so doing the intellectual and emotional equivalent seems less than ideal for me.

I interact as I wish – politely, even with people I disagree with, and I have yet to block anyone for being douchebags. All in all, it feels a lot like I want a social network to be.

A few people are worried about ‘reach’ – one person posted that they wanted Dan Gillmore to have as many followers on Twitter, which when I looked was 10,000 or more than he has on Mastodon, and he’s talked about ‘reach’ – but it’s really engagement that’s the way to measure things in social media, and even with that engagement, it’s about the quality of engagement.

Also of interest – I’ve found more quality blogs to follow on WordPress.com on the Fediverse than I have on WordPress.com in unit time.

All in all, I feel that I’ve spent my time better on the Fediverse through Mastodon than any other social network. You’re not swimming against algorithmic flotsam and jetsam.

I’ll be on Mastodon. Links are on both of my sites at the top. If you pop in, say hi, and enjoy the interesting people with the understanding that you don’t have to agree with people – just like in real life – but you can have conversations, sometimes hard ones, respectfully – rather than dodging them in the echo chambers.

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
View all responses

If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

Categories Schmategories.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

When I read “Genres as Crushers of Creativity” by Jude Berman, I was happy.

I hate categories, and to read someone else talking about how categories in the publishing industries crushes creativity, I was tempted to find a parking lot to dance naked in until I realized people might not appreciate that sight as much as I might enjoy doing it.

So judgemental, humans.

Maybe it’s because of my own identity not fitting neatly into someone else’s category, maybe it’s because I connect things differently than most people seem to. Maybe it’s just not enjoying the prejudices that come with categories.

“Oh, you’re a software engineer, will you fix my computer?”
“It can’t reproduce, it’s already fixed. Unless… well, we won’t discuss that.”

When it comes to blogging, as an example, I have been around 2 decades and I’m heading toward 3. I’ve written about a lot of things, some popular, some not. Douglas Adams once wrote that a nerd is someone who uses a phone to talk to other people about phones, and by that measure the Internet itself is nerdy. We use the Internet to… talk about the Internet.

Yet there’s much more to us. When the ‘blogging tips’ started coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I rolled my eyes and just wrote about whatever I wanted to write about, writing in a niche be damned. We have tags for that stuff. I can write about topics that touch each other sensually or violently that way, and go about my business.

Did I make lots of money doing that? Nope. Not yet anyway. I suppose I would need a business plan of some sort, and that’s not in the cards right now as I keep writing unpublished books, waiting for this AI business to settle down. People find my stuff, they read it, they like it or not, and maybe their world is a little bit better for it. Someone liking or commenting on something that I wrote makes me smile, even if they disagree because it means it provoked thought. Negative emotions are running rampant around the planet, and those conversations are best to be avoided.

When we write – those of us that do beyond short missives to the ether of microblogging – we write to an audience. When I think of the writing that connected with me over the years, the scratching of pens on paper, the tapping of old typewriters, it was as if the author was opening worlds for me beyond time, beyond space, and even beyond death. To flatten the perspectives into simple categories seems silly to me.

Take for example the connection between Toni Morrison and Information Science I wrote about recently – she connected two things and made a very human point. That, to me, is what people who write do – they connect things in human ways, and in a period of technology we forget that. Technology is useless to us unless it empowers us and our ability to connect with other humans – nevermind the AI girlfriends, a disturbing trend if every I saw one.

We get to define the walls that contain who we are. Don’t write for categories. Write for yourself, be it a blog or a book. Or stay in a lane someone else defined for you and eventually wonder why you can’t break out.

Connecting Dots.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

When you read a lot, you find connections. I recently found an example of this through the Marginalian, with the article “The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of Information“1.

We could all use a bit of wisdom in the Information Age.

The quote she pulled that got me interested was by Toni Morrison, who was many good things but was not an information scientist – yet she got to the crux of much of information science in her quote, with a difference.

The full quote, which can be found in a copy of “The Source of Self-Regard” online free here, is:

For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.

Toni Morrison, “The Source of Self-Regard“, 2019

I was floored by this because she connected data to information to knowledge… to wisdom, which is something you see as the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid in Information Science. Gobs and gobs of data make up information, gobs and gobs of information make up knowledge… and gobs and gobs of knowledge gives you wisdom.

Maybe. We hope, anyway. It takes a lot of data to make information, and information is basically purposed data – we look into a cloud of data and try to make sense of it within a context. Information, in turn, is purposed information, which builds knowledge. The elusive wisdom comes from knowledge.

With that simple quotation from her book – and it’s a great book, I read it before writing this – she connected it all to we humans in a very human way. That’s one of the gifts great writers have. I recognized it because I’ve read much on information science and thought much about it, but maybe a lot of people who read Toni Morrison haven’t but she’s exposed them to it.

Maybe more people who are well read on information science will read more Toni Morrison.

Maybe that’s a path from some knowledge to some wisdom.

  1. If you don’t read the Marginalian, I strongly suggest you do. Maria Popova’s managed to do what I had originally intended to do with KnowProSE.com in her own flavor, and she’s worth subscribing to. You can also ma*********@in******.social “>follow the Marginalian on Mastodon here. ↩︎

Reading Write.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Throughout my younger years, as a student, whenever the book list came out for the next year and it had literature, I would read all the literature books over the course of the summer before school started again, and then I would read whatever else I could find.

My father’s novels were pilfered of their words, from Robert Ludlum to Louis L’amour to James Clavell to… well, he didn’t read as quickly as I, and soon enough I was reading his engineering texts, or randomly flipping through the encyclopedias that were in the bookshelf of the office of the print shop. I was tasked to find typos often enough, reading what others had written. Every word expanded my universe that much more, even though I was locked in a prison of someone else’s house in my mind. Every sentence was a slide of escape, every paragraph a rocket that took my mind elsewhere.

When the PC revolution was happening, we got a PC in the print shop and what I read changed. I found myself reading DOS manuals, BYTE magazine, Compute! magazine, and all sorts of other things because the future was exciting and it smelled like books. There was an article I remember – I think it was in a BYTE magazine – and it spoke of hypertext, and I thought this would be a wonderful thing because when I was reading I sometimes would have to venture to a dictionary or thesaurus when I encountered something alien to me. Hypertext, I thought, would be awesome – and decades later, the only website that truly uses hypertext the way that article described is Wikipedia.

For about a decade, all I read were various versions of tech manuals, programming language manuals, hardware manuals and a lot of game programming manuals because, back then, an individual could write a game for a PC. Programming allowed me to exercise my knowledge through experimentation, about how to collate information in different ways. My grades weren’t great in school because the syllabus didn’t have interesting stuff, mostly, and the science syllabus was more of a leash than an exploration.

It was only when I returned to that same house a decade and a half later that I started reading literature again, thanks to Gutenberg.org. Friends had tried to get me to read literature prior, but I was busy working as a software engineer and needed to stay not just current but in a lot of ways prescient. When working in that field, at least at the time, one had to always build new skills and new ways of doing things.

The whole process was a process of growth, and what you read had a lot to do with that, and so I fell behind on all the stuff about being human and had to catch up. Every book, though, added value because it gave me parts of an expanding universe in my mind to draw upon, and when I wrote I drew upon them too, even in technical documentation for my own amusement.

The process of getting the knowledge had value because every book filled me with new questions to press on with – something I noted many people educated did not do, since they had attained their degrees and were satisfied. They stopped in place, some of them, and simply did what was required. They may have been educated, but some of them had stopped learning, something which I do not understand to this day. How can someone be satisfied with unanswered questions?

The world is full of questions unasked, answers untold, and each question answered gives new questions.

We read. We write. To write, we have to read more than we write, but unlike a generative AI, we internalize it and compare it to our own experiences as a human being, and as our experiences grown the same books can hold different questions and answers.

I wonder at a world full of people who do not understand this.

The Misplaced Star.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I awoke to some light creeping through the windows, late for me since I generally awake when it’s dark. My watch was charging, so I didn’t know the time, but it was time for coffee. I made a pot as my mind began catching up, thinking of the dream I just had.

The dream had stuck with me. I played through what I remembered. It had felt like I needed to accomplish many things in my dream. It was an old house I grew up in, and I was alone and was creating the normal mental checklist of things I had to accomplish for that day.

It seemed some things had piled up. The grass needed to be cut, there was writing to be done, and I left the front of the house to survey things. It ends up that somehow half of the grass had been cut, but I saw a pipe that was leaking and turned that off and headed to the back of the house so I could get the tools to repair that and, for some reason, a saw and a hammer.

The back door was locked, so I went back to the front door and on the way there I saw some other things that needed to be done, and by the time I got to the front of the house I had a whole bunch of new things to do, so I headed back to the back door again.

The back door was still locked. I needed to get the key to open it.

Again, I went to the front of the house, climbing those 2 flights of stairs, and went inside to the back of the house and got the keys, then walked back around to the back of the house. I’d picked up the wrong keys, so I went back to the front of the house, went inside, got the right keys, verified the keys – I have little ways of knowing which keys are which on the rings – and went back outside through the front to the back door.

It was then that I awoke, and as I sipped my first cup of coffee, I noted that at no point in the dream did I just unlock the back door from within the house, that I kept making the trek back and forth without doing that, and in doing things that way I got less done. I shook my head, heading outside to sip my coffee with the morning sunrise, but when I did, the sun was in the wrong place.

I had taken a nap. It was evening though it felt like morning to me, and I had not gotten some writing done that I wanted to because I had been dreaming about walking back and forth to a locked door that I could have unlocked in moments without wasting time. Habits, it seems, and not the sort nuns wear.

Just like I had made the coffee out of habit. Just like I had went outside out of habit.

In doing so, I’d misplaced the closest star to a place that I could still see.

Ahh, the tyranny of Time had visited once again.

Across Generations.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Writing is how we passed information on beyond our lifetimes. Many cultures did it verbally prior to it, but with the advent of writing it became easier. Of course, the ideas that were published made it further than those that did not, and those that controlled what was published controlled the way we read history. That’s pretty well accepted now.

Within that we got biases in what was passed along. It’s unfortunate, it’s true, and it’s unfortunately true that this is human. Even so, since other people with different perspectives could write on the same topic, a critical thinker could compare the ideas and decide on a perspective, or combine the perspectives, or reject perspectives.

In turn, they would write – standing, as Isaac Newton would say, on the shoulders of giants.

Now we have generative artificial intelligence writing things without thought – summarizing ideas based on whatever the owners of the generative artificial intelligences feed them, and they do that with little or no worry of transparency. Say what you want about humanity, we at least acknowledge voids in what was written throughout history.

Generative AI, so far, does not. And the books of history will be rewritten across generations.

We do not think across generations often, and perhaps we should. In the end it’s what we don’t know that gives us the best questions, and technology that only gives us answers is useless in this regard.