going full godwin

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Godwin's Law was an old blogosphere joke -- "a discussion thread has outlived its usefulness as soon as Hitler or Nazis are mentioned."
On bogchat, user tommoody started with the Godwin observation that people like to call the Pres a nazi but Amazon's CEO is the real nazi.*
An observation like this serves no real purpose except to make the typist feel better.
Nevertheless bogchat troll ytho, a sort of radical Green with libertarian tendencies, pounced. "He's not a nazi he's the classic neoliberal."
This actually led to an argument over the right epithet to call the CEO.

*aggressive monopolist (i) assumes governmental powers such as subsidizing housing for seniors in warehouse sweatshops, (ii) owns national media for propaganda purposes, (iii) subverts democracy through lobbying, (iv) works with national security state by providing server infrastructure. True, there is no brownshirt or nativist element (yet).

Michael Wetzel -- artwork details

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Clearer views of the artworks described in a previous post. Thanks to Honey Ramka gallery and Michael Wetzel.

Mirror Man_crop

head in sea 2

studio pic 2

head_in_sea_crop

Top to bottom:
Mirror Man, 2017, 24" x 12" x 17", foam, plaster, joint compound, seashells (photo cropped for blog)
Head in Sea, 2017, 16.5" x 11" x 10.5", foam, plaster, joint compound, seashells
Studio and exhibition views of Head in Sea, with Head Under Water, 2017, 16.5" x 11" x 10.5", foam, plaster, joint compound, seashells (bottom-most detail cropped for blog)

(mis)adventure in the so-called maker so-called space

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In principle the "maker" movement -- where people use soldering irons and actually learn how their devices work -- should be applauded. In practice it's still dependent on unscrupulous component manufacturers and/or exploited foreign workers.

Let's say you own a digital synth module that uses an Arduino board and you want to update the firmware. To communicate with the Arduino from your Mac or Windows PC you buy a serial-to-USB device from the synth module company -- cheap at under $10. The company recommends that you download a driver from FTDI, the Scottish company that makes the chip affixed to the serial-to-USB. You install the driver, plug the device into a USB port, and check to see if the PC recognizes the device. Yes, there it is, with serial no. 00000000. The eight zeroes means the driver has determined that the chip is a counterfeit FTDI chip, and will not send data to the device.

You go online and learn that (i) there are more fake FTDI chips for serial-to-USBs on the market (eBay, Amazon, etc) than real chips and (ii) there is no way to tell which chips are fake other than to buy the devices and let the driver determine whether they will pass muster.

Why would FTDI cause devices that they don't manufacture, but that incorporate their products, to become unusable? Apparently the profusion of fake chips from dishonest factories in China challenges their business model, so they are fighting back by punishing innocent third party consumers with clever software that acts as judge and jury for the intellectual purity of all chips (previous versions of this software "bricked" the offending device -- now it just doesn't speak to it). Some makers are outraged and have found other chip sources, but they don't say where they are getting their serial-to-USB devices, which are not made by FTDI. Some are finding "real" FTDI chips, de-soldering and removing the fake ones from the serial-to-USB devices, and soldering on the FTDI chip (a cumbersome and error-prone process considering the device is a $10 component).

Ultimately makers and their noble intentions smack up against unregulated grifters in the country where most electronics are made, and DRM-users in the Anglosphere who treat third party customers as collateral damage. (cue violins)

Sources:
https://softsolder.com/2016/09/02/counterfeit-ftdi-usb-serial-adapter-roundup/
https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2017/03/fixing-fake-ftdi-ft232rl-adapters-ssop.html
https://hackaday.com/2017/03/07/fixing-fake-ftdis/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/10/ftdi_says_knockoff_chips_part_of_criminal_operation/

michael wetzel + stanislaw lem

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standardsofliving2

standardsofliving

These sculptures by Michael Wetzel appeared in a two-person show (with Jeffrey Tranchell) called Standards of Living at Honey Ramka gallery last year. Of the artworks in the show, these objects most drew my eye and lingered in my thoughts afterward. These are blurry screenshots I made from the gallery's photos and don't do justice to the intricacy of the work, but serve as visual notes to accompany a passage from Fiasco (1986), a Stanislaw Lem novel I am reading for the first time. Lem is describing a field of bizarre, fanciful-seeming mineral deposits on the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan.

For the very reason that here nothing served a purpose -- not ever, not to anyone -- and that here no guillotine of evolution was in play, amputating from every genotype whatever did not contribute to survival, nature, constrained neither by the life she bore nor by the death she inflicted, could achieve liberation, displaying a prodigality characteristic of herself, a limitless wastefulness, a brute magnificence that was useless, an eternal power of creation without a goal, without a need, without a meaning. This truth, gradually penetrating the observer, was more unsettling than the impression that he was witness to a cosmic mimicry of death, or that these were in fact the mortal remains of unknown beings that lay beneath the stormy horizon. So one had to turn upside down one’s natural way of thinking, which was capable of going only in one direction: these shapes were similar to bones, ribs, skulls, and fangs not because they had once served life -- they never had -- but only because the skeletons of terrestrial vertebrates, and their fur, and the chitinous armor of the insects, and the shells of the mollusks all possessed the same architectonics, the same symmetry and grace, since Nature could produce this just as well where neither life nor life’s purposefulness had ever existed, or ever would.

Addendum: The first sentence is eloquent and rather long and at first it seemed ungrammatical (perhaps it's the translation from Polish). The core of it is "nature could achieve liberation" but the word "nature," surrounded by other clauses, tends to get swamped, or appears to be paired as a synonym with the word "survival" that precedes it. Regardless, once you have it, this passage is a good example of Lem's Borgesian talent for extrapolation from known phenomena to create "unthinkable" vistas and thought processes. It comes at the end of a description of a volcanic crater where minerals have run riot over millions of years of geological time to create landscapes that seem like amalgamations of our worst nightmares. There is beauty there, as well, which got me thinking about those quasi-biological Wetzel sculptures. Lem is one of the most visual sf writers, and his book Solaris has been stripped down by film directors into something like a simple love story, when the essence of it is his poetic description of the surreal life forms constantly churning in the Solarian "ocean" and human inability to ever understand them.

Addendum 2: Clearer photos of the artworks