Highsmith's persecuted liberals

Patricia Highsmith's
1972 'A Dog's Ransom'
opens with the dog's murder

her 1977 'Edith's Diary'
opens with an attempt
on a pet cat's life

both are peculiar meditations
on the uncomfortable status
of leftists in the USA

in the first case
a young cop
with a psych degree from Cornell

in the second
a Bryn Mawr alumna
who freelances for respectable
lefty magazines

the cop's story is a sort of
chemistry experiment
where a drop of something
with a mildly basic pH
is added to a mildly acidic solution
(ie, idealist among cynics)

and a gradual series
of individually innocuous missteps
each rubbing against the grain
escalate over a few short weeks
into major tragedy




in the other
over two decades
(1955-1975)
the leftist can't catch a break

isolated in a small town
with a bad-seed son
(the abovecited cat-smotherer)
and an ungrateful invalid in-law

her husband runs off
back to the city
with a younger woman

but instead of breaking out
she turns inward
stoically nurturing her ingrates
building a fantasy life in her diary
finding catharsis in competent sculpting

alienating her few lefty friends
with increasingly unconventional
political stances

until in the last 50 pages
based on clues we have to seek
between the lines

her friends all conclude
she's gone mad

and apparently she has

Originality on the Tree of Life

words and phrases
on the inner orbits
of the yahoo zodiac
are more common

those in outer orbits
less common

color the common ones yellow
the rare ones red
with a full orange gradient
between

when a person posts
a rare phrase (or word)
to the web
put a red star
on the Tree of Life

(a common phrase
yellow)

or if they speak
a rare or common phrase

or even think one

now step back

and look for patterns
of red vs yellow

people with large
active vocabularies
use redder words

poets and children and lovers
redder phrases

bad schools
enforce yellow conformity

communities are sometimes visited
by red topics

authors gather
red phrases
into notebooks

trying to turn
yellow pages
redder




[color version]

Heraldic barcodes for video

say you're in the mood
to rent a video

and you make a list of adjectives
describing the ideal video
you're in the mood for

now collect thousands of such lists
from a broad sample of renters
and compile a master list
with the most popular adjectives first




the design challenge
with heraldic barcodes
is to associate each of these
most popular adjectives
with a distinctive graphic element

carefully chosen
so that all the adjective/elements
describing any given movie
can be composed into an icon
that permits quick visual scanning
(eg on a shelf of box-spines)




as with my flickr proposal
the most convenient grouping
must be foreground-background-frame

backgrounds could again be colored stripes
representing genres
so a little element of horror
might be a thin red stripe
while a lot of nudity
a wide pink stripe

mild horror or mild nudity
might use less saturated colors
(or is pink already
unsaturated red?)

clever choice of color-variants
and stripe arrangement
might map more complex
genre-mixes




the frame
(maybe 4 pixels wide
around the whole icon)
should tell how long it is
how expensive/cheap it looks
how smart/dumb
how highly rated

the official rating
might be shown as a letter
located on a stripe
that indicates why it got that rating
(sex, nudity, language, violence)




perhaps the foreground
could be an 'auteur icon'
representing (eg)
a director (eg Tarantino)
a star (Jackie Chan)
a writer (Charlie Kaufman)
a franchise (James Bond)




shorter videos on (eg) youtube
need some custom modifications
to this scheme

frames: length, production values

background-genres:
pratfall, dancing
lipsynch, vlog, etc




and novels
and short stories
need something like this
too

SimLab radio goggles

or: I'm an idiot about
electromagnetic radiation

[this is a visualisation experiment
designed to discover gaps
in my own intuitions
about light, radio, etc

i hope to revise it
as these gaps are
gradually filled]

everyone's seen video
taken with night-vision goggles
of ghostly green GIs
firing into the dark

these work by detecting
the invisible infrared
radiated by any warm body
and somehow or other
translating it
into visible green light

so we could imagine
a future improvement
where the goggles have
a radio dial
and can be tuned to any frequency
(not just infrared)

displaying radiation of that frequency
as shades of greyscale

and rather than wait
until these 'radio goggles'
are practical/real
we could write a software simulation
that shows more-or-less
what we'd someday see

and by designing this sim
in our imaginations
we can refine our intuitions
without either actual
hardware or software




so one menu we'd want
is 'light sources'
(or radiation sources)
including incandescent bulbs
fluorescent bulbs
neon-etc
LEDs
flames and other chemical reactions
fluorescing chemicals
nuclear reactions (incl the sun)
electric circuits
radio transmitters
etc

and we could start by
choosing one source
and tuning the radio dial
to see how bright
that source shines
at every different frequency
(these graphs are readily available)




another menu would be 'materials'
that can be examined
at different frequencies
and different magnifications
under different light sources

and maybe also 'filters'
that could be inserted between
source and material

not neglecting polarising filters
which the display might indicate
with a different color for each
angle of polarisation
(white for unpolarised)




finally we'd like to include
a realworld mode
where any realworld scene
could be checked out
thru the goggles

toggling back and forth
between natural and 'source' light

with a teaching-menu
of 'textbook scenes'
for each frequency
that include examples to explore
of every interesting phenomenon
at that frequency




now starting with sources
my understanding is
that electromagnetic radiation
always originates from
accelerating or decelerating
electric charges
most often electrons

and that a continuous source
implies oscillating electrons
with the frequency of the oscillation
determining the 'color' of the 'light'

electrons normally bound into molecules
that don't radiate until they're excited
by heat or light or electricity
(while electrons in metals flow freely)

with the color of the radiation, then
depending on the structure of the molecule
probably polarised if
the molecules are aligned
and/or the excitation acts
in a particular direction

so i'd like an overview
of each lightsource in these terms
explaining why it emits
the particular frequencies it does

and special views for
broadcast radio frequencies
(AM and FM)
showing how transmitter-antennas radiate
and why reception is poor
under different conditions

and how 'noisy' electrical circuits
emit radiation unintentionally




and similarly for materials

why does a particular chemical
absorb rather than reflect
(or refract or transmit)
particular frequencies?
and how does it surface texture
influence this?

what happens to its
electron structure
as it absorbs photons?

and how selective absorption
can be used to make
detectors for given frequencies
(including radios and their antennas)

Addams Family DSMV

would it be too too heretical
to argue that the 99th remake
of Superman or Batman
has at least as much artistic legitimacy
as a 99th remake of Hamlet?

because the icons of popular culture
resonate necessarily in new ways
as pop culture evolves

and remakes offer a perfect canvas
for deconstructing or rethinking
those icons and their evolution




take the addams family

when the cartoons were adapted
from Ross's prudish New Yorker
to network children's teevee

they lost all hint of menace
so it all became a pose
they'd never really hurt a fly

where the originals had a strain
of corpses-in-the-basement
more suitable to texas chainsaw masochists

but the remake i'd like to see
would follow more the lines
of twin peaks' dale cooper
investigating the black lodge

sociopaths with social standing
sacrificing cheerleaders by the moon

and it could be useful to explore
parallels to the current crop
of political sociopaths

richard perle as gomez
echoing leland palmer's psychotic songs-and-dances

ann coulter as morticia
loosing the dogs of war on the inferior races

dick cheney as fester
you really don't want to know
what he's up to in the basement

barbara bush as grandma
brewing potions in the rose garden

W (or rush limbaugh?) as pugsley
playing frog baseball with beavis and butthead

and i'm seeing wednesday
as a suicidal teen
a cutter (think fiona apple?)
whose redemption
could be the main storymover

and there's a little-noticed
psychological twist
in the observation that
among these sociopaths
uncle fester is unique in retaining
a slightly conflicted conscience

you can see it in his face

a distant memory
that all this is somehow wrong

so agent cooper (eg)
might at least
talk him into untying his bound hands...