“It is a low cost strategy to get motorists to slow down as they approach the bike trail and pedestrian path. While at first motorists may be a little disoriented, the main point is to get them to pay attention and slow down through that area.”

[Source: SNAFU-ed .... Situation Normal]

There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. [page 11]

That’s a brilliant critique of the “collector impulse” and how most of what is collected and passed off as “valuable” or “interesting” is really just more kipple. Collectors, Saramago points out, may delude themselves that they are creating a sense of order, as opposed to chaos, but what they are really doing is just creating organized kipple, and organized kipple is still just as kipply as disorganized or non-organized kipple. In other words, the byproducts of the collecting impulse are merely an arbitrarily “organized” manifestation of, in Technovelgy’s words quoted previously, “available resources transformed into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).”

Hamish Fulton at Little Big Horn Battlefield, Montana, Summer 1969.

Hamish Fulton understands the connection between art and walking. Notes Wikipedia,

Hamish Fulton (born 1946 ,London England), is a “Walking artist” and photographer. His initial work concerned the experience of walking but in the last twenty years Fulton has painted more directly on exhibition walls. Author and writer of books and essays. His wall installation A 21 day coast to coast walking journey, Japan 1996 at the John Weber Gallery, NY incorporates the concrete poetry format and his earlier work A Seven day walk in the mountains Switzerland early summer 1984 was the inspiration for the ‘fulton’ Visual poetry form.

I thought about Hamish Fulton tonight when I read a profile of the British (another walking Brit artist!) novelist Ian McEwan in the February 23, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, The Background Hum: Ian McEwan’s art of unease:

We ascended the crop field; behind us, solar panels on the roof of McEwan’s cottage glistened in the sun. Entering a fern-carpeted wood, McEwan joked that he places his friends along a divide: those who enjoy hiking (Barnes, Michael Frayn) and those who consider it a fatuous premodern practice (Amis, Christopher Hitchens). McEwan relishes the mental restoration that comes from being in nature. “The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” he said. “It has knock-on effects when you go back to work.”

Much of McEwan’s best writing can be tied directly to a long walk….

“The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” is a fantastic description of the in-the-moment feeling I have when hiking, and even more so when skiing. Two days ago I went skiing for the day up at Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe, California. I left home near Berkeley at 5:15 in the morning, drove for three hours, skied from nine until just after 3:00pm, then drove the three hours back home. On the drive home, I was thinking about the beauty of skiing, for me, being inexorably linked to the focus of concentration that this sport demands of me: if I don’t give what I am doing 100% of my attention, I could be horribly injured or die on the mountain. Really good skiers and snowboarders may be able to do it blindfolded, but for me, a merely decent intermediate slope tumbler, exhilaration and terror are bound at the wrists and poised at the edge of a cornice, awaiting my push.

Though I have never been a soldier, I think this feeling must have something in common with the oft-mentioned notion that many soldiers fighting in wars feel most alive when their lives are most threatened. I don’t think it’s a case of being more or less “alive” at any given moment, only that certain situations provide us with a moment of focus and clarity where we are really paying attention to life to a much greater degree than we normally do in our daily lives. This is certainly what Zen Buddhism and mediation point toward, but for me I find it easier and more natural to achieve while flying down a steep snowy mountain nearly out of control than sitting cross-legged on a mat “trying” to think of nothing. While skiing, I don’t have to “try” to think of nothing but the task at hand, it is simply gone from my mind for those blissful moments that I am “trapped fiercely in the present.” And being forced by circumstance to fully confront the moment is a great gift.

The children in Ms. Brown’s class, and in some others at Marine Elementary School and additional schools nearby, are using a type of adjustable-height school desk, allowing pupils to stand while they work, that Ms. Brown designed with the help of a local ergonomic furniture company two years ago. The stand-up desk’s popularity with children and teachers spread by word of mouth from this small town to schools in Wisconsin, across the St. Croix River. Now orders for the desks are being filled for districts from North Carolina to California.

The kids, of course, love it, and seem to be more productive, the measure of which is being taking by a University of Minnesota study of the project. And not only the students benefit: teachers stopping to help a student no longer have to lean way over to get down to the level of a low desk.

Teachers in Minnesota and Wisconsin say they know from experience that the desks help give children the flexibility they need to expend energy and, at the same time, focus better on their work rather than focusing on how to keep still.

Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.

“We can’t say for sure that this has an impact on those two things, but we’re hypothesizing that they may,” said Beth A. Lewis of the School of Kinesiology, or movement science, at the University of Minnesota. “I think we’re so used to the traditional classroom it’s taken a while for people to start thinking outside the box. I think it’s just a matter of breaking the mold.”

What’s so beautiful about this is that it’s a very simple idea that should have been obvious many years ago, but it took one person working in the education trenches to figure it out and make it happen. So how many other “simple” and “obvious” ideas are still out there, right under our noses, waiting to be “discovered”? That’s what’s most exciting, the sheer possibility that work like this opens up. Great job, Ms. Brown!

…The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. “You will never,” he [Taleb] says, “be able to control randomness.”

To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

The book — like Taleb — is also very funny, in a cracking-jokes-while-The-Titanic-sinks sort of way. The Times article is a good introduction to Taleb, his ideas, and the effect they’re having these days. We’ll skip here right to the end of the article:

Taleb’s top life tips

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s home page. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

The novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), explains:

…the First Law of Kipple (is that) ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple’… (one) can roll the kipple-factor back… No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will take over. It’s a universal principal operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Says the technovelgy.com entry on kipple:

Kipple seems to be a combination of entropy and capitalism. I don’t think past civilizations had the resources to produce so much packaging to hold our stuff until we buy it or consume it.

…Physicists will note the similarity to the concept of entropy, which is most usually taken to refer to the tendency of closed systems toward increasing disorder.

I like the definition taken from classical thermodynamics, that entropy is a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. In the 21st century, we seem to be working as hard as we can to take available resources and transform them into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).

Kipple is the perfect word to describe the entropic clutter filling our houses, our cities, our computers and our minds. It’s very sweet, gentle and disarming, just like most kipple, but it sneaks up on you until you finally realize that it has colonized your life, again, just like the thing it describes.

Here are a couple of the comments posted to the Technovelgy page devoted to kipple:

“Is there a relationship or correlation between kipple and noise? Audible kipple? Does noise somehow accumulate the way kipple does? If so, what does it leave behind? ”
( 4/28/2004 4:41:22 PM )

“Interesting thought. Urban environments have a lot of “waste noise” (as opposed to useful noise, like the sound a garbage truck makes when it backs up!). However, noise tends to dissipate; it is absorbed by objects and is attenuated by its passage through the atmosphere. Unlike kipple, which never seems to go away.

On the other hand, Frederick Brown wrote a stunningly original story called The Waveries in 1945, in which sounds had a life of their own. (Philip K. Dick called that story one of the best he ever read.)”
(Chief Technovelgist 4/28/2004 5:45:03 PM )

Originally posted on my personal blog at http://www.jurisich.com/blog/.