Noah’s Mill Bourbon

bourbon

I’ve been singing the praises of Bulleit bourbon on the grounds that it out performs most of the bourbons I’ve tried that are double and even triple the price. So I was rather excited to discover a bottle of Bulleit aged 10 years (about $45). Unfortunately it was a big disappointment and certainly was not worth the price. Up against Noah’s Mill it came over as pretty rough and ammonia-like. Noah’s Mill is the best bourbon I’ve tried and out does by a mile even those bourbons double the price (still a very reasonable 60 or so dollars) — so all in all this is THE bourbon to beat — if you can find a bottle! This is the one bourbon I’d pair with a good cigar.

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Denise Gordon leads Sundays’ Service

gospel music

One of the most powerful (yet capable of immense subtlety) voices I’ve come across of late. This album is exceptional in the choice of material, superbly recorded (not over-produced) and last, but not least, backed by a very strong lineup of musicians including Tommy Sancton and Lars Edegran — and that’s class that really does shine through. Yes, Denise Gordon is without doubt an honorary New Orleanian. Thank goodness she left accountancy behind! Check out her YouTube channel and see just how strong and versatile she is.

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The Mangy Parrot 7

The Mangy Parrot

“These studies are useful, pleasant, and entertaining, young friend, because the mind does not encounter in them the abstractions of theology, the uncertainties of medicine, the intricacies of law, nor the ruggedness of mathematics. It is all satisfying, all delightful, all enchanting, and all educational, both physics as well as natural history. It doesn’t exhaust you to study it, and you don’t tire of it as an occupation. Its teachings are sweet, and it is served in a golden cup.

“Those who look at the universe from the outside are surprised by the lovely perspectives it offers; but they merely surprise themselves as little children do when they first see some pretty toy. The philosopher, looking at the universe with different eyes, goes beyond simple surprise: he knows, observes, scrutinizes, and admires everything about Nature. If he lifts his mind toward the heavens, he loses himself among those spaces filled with the most sovereign majesty: if he turns his attention to the Sun, he sees an enormous mass of intense fire, which is penetrating and inextinguishable, but at the same time beneficial and advantageous to all of Nature; if he observes the moon, he knows that it is a globe with mountains, seas, valleys, and rivers, no different from the globe he walks on, and that it is a mirror reflecting the brilliant light of the Sun and communicating its influences to us; if he observes the planets, such as Venus, Mercury, Mars, and the rest of the multitude of heavenly bodies, both fixed and wandering, he contemplates no less than an infinity of worlds, some lit from within and others reflecting light from without, some suns and others moons that constantly observe the movements and orbits prescribed for them by the Almighty since the beginning. If he lowers his reflections to this planet we inhabit, he wonders at the economy with which it was crafted; he sees water suspended on earth, held back only by a frail dusting of sand; sees towering mountains, thundering cascades, cheerful springs, tame creeks, swift-flowing rivers; sees trees, plants, flowers, fruits, jungles, valleys, hills, birds, wild beasts, fish, man, and even the contemptible little crawling insects; and all of it, all of it offers him a theater for his curiosity and investigation.

“The atmosphere, clouds, rain, morning dew, hail, ignis fatuus, aurora borealis, thunder, lightning flashes and blasts, and all the meteors of Nature present a vast field for his detailed and meticulous examination; and after he has admired, contemplated, The Mangy Parrot examined, meditated on, pondered, and sharpened his mind upon this prodigious chaos of heterogeneous beings, as admirable as they are incomprehensible, he pauses to reflect that his knowledge or ignorance of these same things leads him, as if by the hand, to the very foot of the Creator’s throne. Then the true philosopher cannot but be overwhelmed and fall prostrate before the Supreme Deity, confess His power, praise His providence, silently recognize the sublimity of His wisdom, and give infinite thanks to Him for the deluge of benefits that He has rained down upon His creatures—the most noble, the most exalted, the most privileged, and the most ungrateful of His earthly creatures being Man, under whose feet (as the voice of truth tells us) He has put all creation: Omnia subjecisti sub pedibus ejus. No sooner does the philosopher reach these lofty and necessary heights of knowledge than he becomes a contemplative theologian, for just as all the spokes of a cartwheel rest on the axle that forms their center, so all creatures recognize their central point in the Creator; thus, any impious atheist who denies the existence of a God who has created and preserved the universe, is working against the common testimony of all nations, for the most barbarous and savage nations have recognized this sovereign principle; because the heavens themselves proclaim the glory of God, the firmament announces His wondrous works, and all the creatures that reveal themselves to our sight are guides leading us to adore the wonders that we see. But as you can see, atheists are all brutes who only seem like men, or men who voluntarily wish to be less than brutes. This much is obvious. . . . ”

*****

The first is a mind that bends to reason; the second, a noble and sensitive heart, which has never let me give in to my passions. I put it this way, because when I have at times committed excesses, it has been difficult for me to subordinate my spirit to my flesh. That is, I have committed evil knowing what I was doing and riding roughshod over the protests of my conscience, and in the full awareness of justice, as befalls every man who slips into crime. Because of these good qualities, which, as I say, I have noted in my soul, I have never been vengeful, not even against my enemies, much less against someone who I knew had counseled me well, if perhaps somewhat harshly; which is not a common thing, because our self-love ordinarily suffers from the gentlest corrections; and because of this, the people at the hacienda were amazed by the friendly harmony they observed between me and the father.

*****

“Father,” I said to him, “is that how rational beings act, exposing their lives to be sacrificed by an enraged beast? And do so many people troop in to enjoy the blood of the brutes spilled, and perhaps even that of their fellow men?”

“That is precisely what happens,” the curate answered me, “and it will keep happening in the realms of Spain until at last we forget this custom, as repugnant to Nature as it is to the enlightenment of the century in which we live.”

*****

“Look here,” the father said to me; “I will gladly help you improve yourself, but that would be revenge, a vile passion that you should curb your whole life long;The Mangy Parrot taking revenge denotes a low soul, one incapable of overlooking the slightest affront. Pardoning insults is not only the characteristic sign of a good Christian, but also of a noble and great soul. Anyone, no matter how poor, feeble, or cowardly, is capable of avenging an offense; that doesn’t take religion, talent, wisdom, nor nobility, high birth, education, nor anything that is good; all you need is to have a debased soul and to let your anger run wild, and then subscribe to the bloody emotions it inspires. To forgive an affront, to pardon those who offend us, and to repay evil with beneficent acts, you not only need to know the Gospel (though that should be sufficient), but to have a heroic soul and a sensitive heart, and those are none too common; nor is it a common occurrence to find heroes like Trajan, of whom it is said that, when he was receiving his subjects in public audience, a shoemaker went up to the throne pretending to beg for justice; he drew close to the emperor, and taking advantage of his lowered guard, slapped him. The people surged forward, and the sentinels wanted to kill him on the spot; but Trajan would not allow it, wishing to punish the man himself. With the traitor held tight before him, Trajan asked: ‘How have I offended you? What motive did you have to injure me?’ The shoemaker, being as thickheaded as he was vain, replied: ‘Sir, the people say their blessings for your amiable character; I have no complaint to make of you; rather, I committed this sacrilegious crime, knowing that I would die, so that future generations would say that a shoemaker had the courage to slap the emperor Trajan.’ ‘Very well, then,’ Trajan said; ‘if that was your motive, I won’t let you surpass me in courage. I also want posterity to say that, if a shoemaker dared to slap the emperor Trajan, then Trajan had the courage to pardon the shoemaker. You are free.’ No need to praise this act; it recommends itself, and you can deduce from it and from thousands of similar acts along the same lines that, to seek revenge, you have to be low and cowardly; but not seeking revenge takes nobility and courage; for knowing how to conquer oneself and tame one’s passions is the most difficult conquest of all, and therefore is the most praiseworthy victory and the most reliable proof of a magnanimous and generous heart. For all these reasons, I think that it would be good for you to forget and overlook Mr. Januario’s insults.”

“Well, father,” I said, “if it takes more courage to pardon an insult than to inflict one, then from now on I declare that I won’t take revenge on Juan Largo or on anyone else who ever affronts me in this life.”

“Oh, Don Pedrito!” the curate answered me. “How valuable such resolutions would be in this world if only they were carried out! But there is no reason to declare a resolution arrogantly, because we are all weak and frail, and we cannot trust our own virtue, nor feel secure in our word alone. In the hour of the storm, sailors make a thousand promises, but when they pull in to port, they forget them as if they had never been uttered. When the earth trembles, all you can hear are prayers, acts of contrition, and pledges to reform; but when the quake ends, the drunks head back to their cups, the lewd back to the ladies, the gamblers back to the card tables, usurers back to their profits, and everyone back to their old vices. One of the most unbecoming things about man is his confidence in himself. That confidence is what makes young people liable to prostitute themselves, prudish souls to stray, administrators of justice to yield to temptation, and the wisest and saintliest of men to José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi become delinquents. Solomon lied; and St. Peter, who thought himself the bravest of the apostles, was the first and only to deny his divine Teacher. So we shouldn’t put too much trust in our own strength, nor chatter too long about our word of honor, for until the moment comes, we’re all as firm as a rock; but, when it arrives, we’re a miserable bunch of reeds, bending to the first breeze that hits us.”

*****

“Not very happy, if you’ll pardon my saying so,” said the vicar; “for this gentleman doesn’t understand a word of anything he’s said; rather, he’s a philosophical blasphemer.

Mangy_Parrot

Herbert Simon and Agent-Based Computational Economics

Herbert Simon

The seventh in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Shu-Heng Chen and Ying Fang Kao

Herbert Simon is a quintessential interdisciplinary scholar who has made pioneering contributions concerning the notion of bounded rationality, has built models based on it, and has also made important advances in understanding complex systems. His importance in the field of artificial intelligence, which is in turn the inspiration of agent-based computational economics (ACE), is discussed in detail in Chen (2005). Among all the Nobel Laureates in Economics, there are at least three whose work has been acknowledged by the ACE community. They are Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), Thomas Schelling, and Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012). The last two directly worked on ACE. Schelling’s celebrated work on the segregation model is considered as one of earliest publications on ACE (Schelling, 1971). Ostrom had contributed to the development of the empirical agent-based models (Janssen and Ostrom, 2006). Hayek did not work on ACE, but the connection of his work to ACE has been pointed out by Vriend (2002).

We believe that there is a strong connection between the development of ACE and Herbert Simon and that his influence on ACE is not less, if not more, profound than the previous three. However, to the best of our knowledge, there seems to be no single document that from a holistic perspective addresses this linkage explicitly.[i] We conjecture that the burgeoning of ACE was too late for the time of Simon, who ended his professional life in 2001. However, even so, it still surprises us that so few attempts have been made to connect Simon and ACE, particularly considering that the latter was founded on artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, the two pillars to which the former has contributed substantially.

In this chapter, we attempt to explore and identify the connections between Simon’s contributions and the development of ACE. We concentrate on his influence on the conception of an individual within an economic or social system, his philosophy regarding how the social systems are organized and can be understood, and finally about how the underlying rules that govern social interactions can be unearthed by the investigator, in this case a social scientist. We also suggest ways with which the future developments within ACE can be geared to be more Simonian in character and to be closer to his vision.

The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the setting in which we place our arguments. We then divide our arguments into three main departments: individuals, complex systems and the epistemology of ACE. In Section 3, the modeling of software agents in light of Simon’s bounded rationality is discussed. In Section 4, various aspects of complex systems are included here. In Section 5, we elaborate on ACE’s potential as an alternative to neoclassical economics. We conclude the paper in the last section.

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Imitation and Novelty in Product Development

stigmergic, stigmergy

Here’s an extract from the third article by Ted Lewis and Richard Bergin from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue.

  1. A human stigmergy framework for product development

Many investigators over the past century have attempted to quantify human innovation as a property of social organizations such as corporations as well as individual entrepreneurs. Andergassen et al. argue that innovation appears in two forms – from invention and diffusion:

The first is an exogenous thrust imparted to the system by a random innovative arrival whilst the second is due mainly to innovation that takes place through diffusion of information (Andergassen et al., 2006).

For the purposes of this paper, “random innovation” is a type of novelty, and “diffusion of information” is a type of imitation. In fact, novelty appears whenever an unexpected breakthrough “randomly occurs”, and imitation appears whenever an idea is copied, regardless of how it arrives.

Andergassen et al. further claim that occurrences of product innovation obey a long-tailed distribution, or Levy flight in time, because diffusion of information accumulates until reaching a point of self-organized criticality, SOC. Then an avalanche of copycat products mimics products developed from the initial “random innovation”. The sudden appearance of the Apple iPhone and iPad are apparent examples: the iPhone appeared as a random innovation and was quickly imitated by an avalanche of copycats. Thus, product development is a series of episodic “random innovations” or novelties, followed by an avalanche of copycats, or imitations.

Ferrary and Granovetter (2009) further develop the idea of the spread of product innovation through imitative diffusion by modeling Silicon Valley and other highly creative industrial commons as social networks. Venture capital firms supply “information diffusion” services as well as money, acting as a kind of transmitter of intellectual viruses through their social network:

The presence of venture capital (hereafter VC) firms in an innovative cluster opens potential specific interactions with other agents in the network (universities, large companies, laboratories) that determine a particular dynamic of innovation. In this perspective, what is distinctive about Silicon Valley is its complete and robust complex system of innovation supported by social networks of interdependent economic agents in which the VC firms have a specific function (Ferrary and Granovetter, 2009, p. ??).

In this model, imitation and novelty is a human activity akin to stigmergy in the animal kingdom, whereby imitative actions (work) are stimulated by social interactions initiated by previous novel and imitative actions (work). What distinguishes the Silicon Valley entrepreneur from others is the social network embodied in the VC firm. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur leverages this advantage to “out-innovate” entrepreneurs from other industrial commons. It is this stigmergic work done by networking that makes Silicon Valley more productive.

If product development is a byproduct of invention (novelty) and information obtained through stigmergic social network diffusion (imitation), then it should be possible to demonstrate the machinery of the evolutionary process itself. The sudden appearance of an “innovative product” such as the Apple iPhone should be traced to earlier novel and imitative products, etc. Furthermore, assuming an idea is transmitted by a social network of cooperating actors (diffusion of information for the purpose of imitation), it should be possible to demonstrate and model the machinery of product development as a form of human stigmergy.

This paper develops a stigmergic model of product development based on the forgoing concepts of novelty and imitation in social networks. It postulates that invention is a group activity, rather than the result of an isolated inventor working in isolation. Furthermore, the group dynamic is stigmergic, meaning that each advance incorporates previous novelties and imitations. No advance is an isolated step. The process of combining novelty and imitation is modeled as a self-organizing network of stigmergic “breakthroughs”. Some breakthroughs simply combine existing product designs (imitation), while others combine new and novel features with existing designs.

 

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Walker Percy Wednesday 77

walker percy

percycovercroppea

Then do what? Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. I don’t know why I want to talk to you or what I need to tell you or need to hear from you. There is something … about that night … I discovered something. It’s strange: I have to tell you in order to know what I already know. I talk, you don’t. Perhaps you know even better than I that too much has been said already. Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to.

As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o’clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o’clock, hung over, mouth scammed, breath foul, hands atremble, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink.

*****

Elgin was a senior at M.I.T. and had what he thought were two reasons to be grateful to me, though I knew better than to rely on gratitude, a dubious state of mind if indeed there is such a thing. And in truth I had done very little for him, the kind of easy favors native liberals do and which are almost irresistible to the doer, if not to the done to, yielding as they do a return of benefit to one and a good feeling to the other all out of proportion to the effort expended. That was one of the pleasures of the sixties: it was so easy to do a little which seemed a lot. We basked in our own sense of virtue and in what we took to be their gratitude. Maybe that was why it didn’t last very long. Who can stand gratitude?

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The Journal of Mind and Behavior 36: 3 and 4

journal of mind and behavior

The latest issue of JMB is now available. The reviews are of particular interest since the Critical Notice is devoted to my chum Joaquín Fuster’s The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity: Our Predictive Brain written by Valerie Gray Hardcastle; a standard review by Maria Pia Paganelli of yours truly’s coedited Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith (I haven’t seen it so I don’t know if it’s good, bad or indifferent); and Patrick Seniuk’s review of Giovanna Colombetti’s The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind.

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Go, Johnny, Go

John Lydon, music

John Lydon thankfully has the balls, the independence of mind, the honesty, the integrity and the intelligence to carry the baton that Frank Zappa held for so long — they have the same vested interests and moral hypocrites in their sights. John called out that fucker Jimmy Saville way back in ’78 but of course the BBC “intelligentsia” took no notice.

On a different topic also thanks John (and Elton John) for calling out Elvis Costello — I knew that of late that he was a musical phony (I don’t know how Allen Toussaint and the producers of Treme were taken in by him) but anyway I had no idea that he was such a gormless weasel. Thanks John Lydon for also adding Russell Brand and Louise Mensch to the list of celeb fuckwits . . .

Check out the interview below with John plugging his autobiography. Never mind the grammar or diction — that’s what makes Louis Armstrong’s memoir of his early years in New Orleans so brilliant since it captures his voice — and that’s the point of Lydon’s book as well. In any event, John and Louis’ language is infinitely more expressive than ostensibly schooled folk now with 40% of their word power constituted by the inappropriate use of the word “like”. It makes me want to retch.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 76

walker percy

percycovercroppea

So anyhow I began my new life then when I stepped out of my life routine worn bare and deep as a cowpath across a meadow, climbed out of my rut, stopped listening to the news and Mary Tyler Moore. And strangely, stopped drinking and smoking. The second I left my old life’s cowpath, I discovered I didn’t need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.

*****

Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I.

*****

Five, six, seven years of unacknowledged idleness (it takes work to be idle and not acknowledge it), drinking and watching TV, working at play, playing at work—what does it do to a man? My hands were open in front of my face. The fingers closed and opened. I felt like Rip van Winkle waking up and testing his bones. Was anything broken? Was I still in one piece?

Was I still strong? How much abuse will a body take? I looked at my fist.

Stigmergic coordination in FLOSS development teams: Integrating explicit and implicit mechanisms

stigmergy

The second article by Francesco Bolici, James Howison and Kevin Crowston from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue. Their article is open access.

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