zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — burqas and veiled threats, Martha Nussbaum, virtual reality ]
.

I believe the photo is from Dubai, the cartoon is by New Zealand’s Malcolm Evans, and all sorts of things are going on when we put the two of them together, thus:

**

For a start, the photographer presumably saw the same thing with his eyes and through his lens that the cartoonist saw in the mind’s eye, and then on paper. Who knows, one of them may have seen the other’s work, and that could have been what triggered their interest in capturing the same effect.

Call that the problem of simultaneous, independent vs sequential, causally connected origination. It’s a fascinating issue in archetypal psychology and cultural anthropology…

Then there’s the juxtaposition of the two images, and the fact of their close similarities and differences. Apart from the obvious difference of media, there’s the neat difference that the women in the photo reality might be thinking roughly the thoughts attributed to them in the cartoon, we’ll never know because thoughts are private — but the cartoon reality adds a “virtual” layer of text to the image, so the women’s “thoughts” and their parallelisms and oppositions are no longer tacit.

But then — hey, those two sets of thought are juxtaposed, just as the two styles of clothing are — so each of the two images I’ve juxtaposed is itself a carefully-executed juxtaposition, artfully conceived, and revealing by comparing and contrasting.

Each of those two images is a Sembl move.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the issue of burqas and veils — or bikinis and short short skirts — yet.

**

But this post is really my oblique way of introducing Martha Nussbaum‘s book, The New Religious Intolerance, which grew out of her column on veils and burqas — and tummy tucks and breast implants — Veiled threats, on the NY Times Opinionator blog.

I’d love to review it. Will I ever even find time to read it?

**

Veils worn by nuns, Muslims, ninjas — and everybody in the Windy City in December. Circumcision in Islam and Judaism, metzitzah b’peh — and various forms of female genital mutilation around the world. Prayer in schools, other people’s prayers in school. Peyote and wine as taboos, as sacraments. Pork and beef, pigs and cows. Kosher, halal, voodoo — and Socrates sacrificing a cock to Asclepius…

This business of religion and society is a subtle, multi-faceted business.

**

**

My sympathies tend to go with whoever wants to wear whatever. But then I tell myself, I have different body parts, and they have different preferences.

Perhaps more accurately — and certainly more metaphorically — I might say that I am part-angel, part-beast.

Either way, I too contain multitudes.

[ by Charles Cameron — Dutch Islamophobia offers a terrible example of the sign turning into the signified ]
.

.

The quote that follows is offered without much comment, except to note that the formal correspondences between the two instances of “Henk and Ingrid” are as compelling as the two situations themselves.

From Islamophobia Watch:

As the Netherlands heads for a general election, barely a day passes without a mention of “Henk and Ingrid”, or Mr and Mrs Average, in a political debate that has revolved around the economy and the euro zone debt crisis.

The invention of populist politician Geert Wilders – who heads the anti-immigration, anti-euro Freedom Party – this mythical couple attracted a different kind of notoriety after a real Dutch Henk, with a wife called Ingrid, killed a Turkish immigrant, prompting commentators to warn that populism can backfire.

**

Compare the strange story of the writing and real-life enactment by the avatar of Vishnu of Valmiki‘s Ramayana, which I alluded to in a comment on William Benzon’s blog:

I recall that when I was in India more than thirty years ago, I was told the Ramayana was written by Valmiki, first among poets — and it was only afterwards, and under the poem’s inspiration, that Vishnu did indeed take the form of Rama and come to earth to live out the story already depicted in Valmiki’s epic.

[ by Charles Cameron — Escher, Borges, simulating the future, wargames, A Pattern Language, Sembl ]
.

.
Ridiculous phrase, a library of windows. Unless you think, as I do, of books as windows onto different worlds, in which case it makes a whole lot of sense, and a decent library has more windows onto more profoundly different worlds than any physical room — and here we are getting into the territory of Jorge Luis Borges (links to Library of Babel) and Maurits Escher (image above).

And let me just state for the record that Godel Escher Bach could just as well have been Escher Carroll Borges, and that a comparison between the logics of Escher and Borges is one of the desiderata of our times.

That’s a Sembl move.

**

Let’s expand the concept of window to include the sort of inter-worldview glimpse that Haaretz describes today here:

Last week, in a small beit midrash (study hall) named after Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood, an emergency meeting was convened to discuss instigating freedom of religion and worship on the Temple Mount. It was a closed meeting attended by representatives of the Temple Institute, HaTenu’ah LeChinun HaMikdash (the Movement to Rebuild the Holy Temple) and the Temple Mount Faithful, as well as two representatives of Women for the Mikdash, and others. The activists met to try to understand how they could overcome the authorities, who they believe are plotting against them, and return to the Temple Mount. At this meeting, Haaretz was offered a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of the most ardent activists in the battle to Judaize the Temple Mount.

**

Here’s the meat of the post, as yet uncooked. Back in 2005, but brought to my attention today by Rex Brynen at Paxsims, is this piece from Strategy Page:

After eight years of effort, and spending over $300 million, the U.S. Army has officially received its new wargame (WARSIM) for training battalion, brigade, division, and as big as you want to get, commanders, and their staffs. Now even the most elaborate commercial wargame would not get $300 million for development, and eight years to create the system. But wargames for professional soldiers have different requirements, and a troublesome Department of Defense bureaucracy to deal with. First, the requirements. Commercial wargames shield the player from all the boring stuff (support functions, especially logistics.) But professional wargames must deal with these support activities, because in a real war, these are the things commanders spend most of their time tending too. …

WARSIM covers a lot of complex activities that a commander must deal with to achieve battlefield success. Besides logistics, there’s intelligence. Trying to figure out what the enemy is up to is, next to logistics, the commanders most time consuming chore.

— which in turn was referenced by Michael Peck writing in a Kotaku piece today titled Why It’s So Hard to Make a Game Out of the 21st Century:

Let’s build a game. Let’s make it a strategy game. We will realistically simulate global politics in the 2030s. Perhaps a sort of Civ or Supreme Ruler 2020-type system.

Where shall we start? How about something easy, like choosing the nations in the game? It’s simple enough to consult an atlas. We’ll start with Britain…but wait! Scotland is on the brink of declaring independence from the United Kingdom. Should Britain be a single power, or should England and Scotland be depicted as a separate nation? What about Belgium splitting into Flemish and Walloon states? And these are old, established European nations. How will states like Syria and Nigeria look in two decades? It was only a bit over 20 years ago that the Soviet Union appeared to be a unshakeable superpower that controlled Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

**

Let’s cook that meat, let’s make a meal of it.

Peck’s piece goes into many other ways in which predictive gaming isn’t terribly productive.

But it left me asking the question, what would I do with a game-sized budget, if my aim was to push military and intelligence towards greater insight.

And my answer would be to embed information in walls. In corridors…

To build windows at sparse and irregular intervals into the internal corridors that connect any given office in the Pentagon or three-letter agency — or my local preference (hush, I know it’s the Glorious Fourth tomorrow) MI-5 and -6 — through which analysts and decision makers can glimpse snippets of information.

Which can then fall into the deep well of memory.

It is deep within that well of half-forgotten knowledge, ST Coleridge tells us, that the “hooks-and-eyes of memory” link one thought with another to build a creative third.

**

A wall, then. I would build a wall embedded with facts and fancies, maps and illustrations, graphs and stats, film clips and news clips, anecdotes and quotes — even, perhaps, tiny alcoves here and there with books free for the taking, music CDs, DVDs of movies, old, new, celebrated, strange…

And I would be constantly shifting and rearranging the “views” from my windows, so that what was seen yesterday would not be what would be seen tomorrow — yet with a powerful index of words, topics, themes, memes, image contents, names of actors, newscasters, authors and so forth, so that what was once seem and dimly recalled could be recaptured.

**

The concept here is pretty much the exact opposite of having a huge black poster proclaiming Creativity Matters!

Don’t get me wrong, creativity does matter (get that poster and others here), but it “works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform” — and the way to entice it is to see things out of the corner of the eye…

The windows I’m looking for, therefore, offer glimpses you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you were deep in thought or conversation, and conversely, wouldn’t see twice and grow so familiarized to that they’d become irrelevant by repetition. They’d be glimpsed in passing, their esthetic would be that of Christopher Alexander’s Zen View, pattern 134 in his brilliant work — the closest we have to a Western I Ching — Pattern Language:

The idea, then, is to seed the memory with half-conscious concepts, patterns, facts and images, carefully selected and randomly presented — so that those hooks and eyes have the maximum chance of connecting some scrap of curious information with a pressing problem.

Which is how creativity tends to work.

**

That way each corridor becomes a game-board — but it is in the analyst’s focused mind that the game is played and won.

What you’d get, in effect, would be community-wide, ongoing free-form gameplay in complete alignment with the web-based game we’re currently developing at Sembl. Games of this genre will also have powerful application in conflict resolution.

And peace.

[ by Charles Cameron — flabberghasted by what new things he learns daily — comparative religion ]
.

From the al-Qiyamah site:

Prophesied Sure Signs of Allah (SWT) will confirm Al-Qiyamah

Nafas al Rachman, breath of the Merciful, experienced daily by those taking part in Al-Qiyamah (The Resurrection) (Photo taken 1st August 2008 in Russia of the Nafas al Rachman which, though invisible to the naked eye, can be felt as Cool Breeze or Wind of the Resurrection flowing from hands, head and other parts of the body.)

Compare Acts 2. 1-4:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

***

If you follow Twitter, you’re familiar with the phrase “retweeting does not imply endorsement” — my equivalent here would be “juxtaposition does not imply eqivalence.”

[ by Charles Cameron — games in education — written in 1996 for friends on the Magister-L mailing list — for background, see In response to Lewis Shepherd ]
.

I’ve been thinking about education, “edutainment” and games, with special reference to Myst-type games, Glass Bead Games and Universities not unlike my own alma mater, Oxford…

Here are some preliminary ideas…

I: Proposal

There is no reason why the books in a MYST-like game shouldn’t be real books.

Yeah? So?

There is no reason why studying the books in a MYST-like game to gain access to the information needed to “solve puzzles” within the game structure and gain access to more advanced levels of the game should be any different from studying the same books in an OXFORD-like university to gain access to the information needed to “pass exams” within the academic structure and gain access to more advanced levels of knowledge…

There is no reason why education and game should not merge. OXFORD is a walk-thru MYST, and the puzzles are exams. Education is Game, the supreme Game of life itself.

The only thing needed to make the future of computer game playing and the future of computer education one thing is a concept of gaming which extends as far as the concept of education — and Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game does this.

A future Glass Bead Game with Myst-like properties could encompass the entirety of education, because (a) unlike chess it deals in the sum of human culture and knowledge while (b) its own skills involve a chess-like mastery: its game aspect stretches as high as its knowledge base.

We already know from such things as Sesame Street that learning about “fiveness” can take place at the intersection of education and entertainment, with a kangaroo bouncing five oranges on a trampoline and gleefully calling out “five, five”. We suspect that at this level, the entertainment element adds to the student’s interest in learning.

We also suspect that at higher levels of learning, entertainment quite naturally gives way to the “more important” educational element. No need to entertain, the subject itself fascinates…

But Feynmann — the Nobel Prize man, the drummer, the CalTech fellow — entertains while he educates, educates while he entertains: it’s an aspect of the nature of his genius…

The future of education lies in a Game involving mastery in the acquiring and manipulating of knowledges, both in depth within individual disciplines, and in breadth across them. This is the future of the Glass Bead Game…

It is stored on megacomputers. It is accessible through cable lines coming into your home. It is displayed on your new hi-res TV screen. Think of a terabyte holographic storage device which could transfer info in or out a gigabyte per second… Its architecture contains “rooms” at all levels of learning from K through post doctoral, in all subject areas. Any student of whatever age can access any “room” to which he has solved the “prerequisite” puzzles. The “rooms” contain a massive library of “books” and an equally impressive video library…

Imagine a world in which the very best classes taught at Harvard, Yale, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne are accessible on the web in video form…

Imagine a world in which students can supplement their “live” classes with access to a virtual environment of this sort…

The arts — at the level of a Mozart, a Bach, a Yeats, a Shakespeare, a Leonardo, a Michelangelo — are games. Creative play with a very high order of skill…

Imagine the Great Game…

II: Background

That’s the main thrust of where I’m going, but it may help if I add in some background, in the form of the following notes:

I am wondering about a number of “threads” that seem to come together somewhere hereabouts:

(i) a recent effort in California to put together all the information in a “geography” curriculum from kindergarten through — I think — the second year of college on videodisks, in such a way that a student of any age could move as far and as fast through it as his/her ability to give “correct” answers to the quizzes along the way permitted…

(ii) the notion that large film archives such as those maintained by the studios may in the not too distant future be accessible on-line, with real time delivery along fiber optic “phone” cable for display on the “tv” screen…

(iii) the notion that all the classes in, say, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg… could be videotaped, also in the not too distant future, and be made available in a similar fashion…

(iv) efforts to put large libraries online in toto: I gather from an IBM commercial (!), for instance, that the Indiana musicological library is now available to the daughters of Italian vineyard owners over the net…

Putting these all together, I see the possibility of computers storing and delivering enough in the way of first class lectures and libraries to allow students of whatever age to move as far and as fast through self-education as their interest and capacity to pass quizzes permits…

III: Invitation

The “proposal” and “background” above, taken together, represent the thinking I’ve done so far, and the direction I hope to take — they’re my personal “state of the art” on all this. I suspect there are people already working on many of the ideas that go into this mix — but that the overall vision here is a “gourmet” version, and that we’ll get pretty thin soup if we leave it to people outside the GBG environment to do all the cooking.

There’s further background on the origins of Myst-like games in the classical Art of Memory in my piece The Mysts of Antiquity.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing these ideas in more detail.