lovehatethings

One of the features Amazon has built into its recommendation engine is the "Frequently Bought Together" section that, I'm guessing, is supposed to inspire you to think "WOW! If other people are buying that, I should probably by it too!"

In the case of a recent purchase of, however, (and what I'm sure isn't a rare occurrence) there were two pieces of media that I could never imagine going together... ever. You see, the concept of "Frequently Bought Together" would indicate to me, more than once. Now I could buy into the fact that perhaps no one who had purchased that Ben Folds' University A Cappella! CD would necessarily buy the same second item before leaving Amazon. I more than expected the second item in the side-by-side purchase push to be another CD by Ben Folds or similar genre pounding piano rocker. I was shocked to find out that, as evidenced by the "Frequently" recommendation, the most popular accompanying item was the DVD Repulsion by Roman Polanski.

Ben Folds CD is described as "a great mix of pop-sounding arrangements (with beat-boxing and voices substituting as drums) and more traditional a capella singing (with lovely harmonies, etc.)"

Polanski's Repulsion, on the other hand, "shows us, in simple but effective terms, the horrors that lurk inside a troubled psyche. While obviously working on a shoestring budget, Polanski recreates with disturbing impact the strange and unsettling horror of a mind that has begun to turn upon itself. Carol Ledoux is not on a strong emotional footing as the story begins: she's at once compelled by and terrified of her sexual needs, and she displays an unhappy emotional distance from others that suggests a mild form of autism. When Carol is left alone after her sister leaves on vacation, her fragile connection with the rest of the world gives way, and. as she isolates herself in her apartment, Carol's mind fragments into a hallucinatory state, which Polanski manifests on-screen with an apt surrealism. Within the increasingly grim and shadowy confines of the flat, revolting images of rotting food and buzzing flies mingle with things that shouldn't or couldn't actually be there, and Polanski's impressionistic use of odd angles, visual distortion, and blunt, shocking violence make Carol's world seem as frighteningly alien to us as it must be to her."

Now those Ben Folds haters out there might think themselves clever by saying... "I get it. Ben Folds REPULSES me!" But to use film commercial techniques, I believe I can make the case for the tie...

The new Ben Folds CD is "simple but effective". Its "strong emotional footing" will convince detractors as "the rest of the world gives way". A "frighteningly" "apt" selection that will have an "impressionistic" "impact" all over the "world".

Canadian Governor-General Michaelle Jean ate a piece of raw seal heart in an Inuit community yesterday... and I say bloody well flippering right!

Some considerations on what we may be sacrificing to Wolfram Alpha's "computational" engine, and a long lingering question about why the colon separator has become so popular in non-fiction.

First of all, get your minds out of the anatomical gutter at the mention of the word colon.

Second of all, remember that in an age of 140 character messaging and blip journalism, the redundant has its own function.

In strolling through a big box bookstore today, I realized the concept of the colon-divided title has pretty much taken over all of non-fiction. Now I completely understand the appeal of such a titling archetype. Every author wants to stamp some personal creativity onto the ink-laden tome that it's taken them weeks or years to produce. But, as the bane of a publisher's existence is not being able to convey the catchphrase content of a book in 2 seconds or less, the creative title cannot last on its own. I remember thinking myself execeeding clever in high school and university in developing the titular witticisms that allowed me to show creative flair in delivering an essay on what was usually a dry topic.

As an example of the redundancy of the archetype I take a couple of the most popular non-fiction titles on Amazon and expose the relative meaninglessness of the pre-colon text.

Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time lends itself to such examination. Let's take the pre-colon text alone and adapt as necessary for whichever situation we can see fit.

Three Cups of Tea:

...How to Defeat Narcolepsy
...Liz, Chuck, and Bill and the Line to the British Throne
...Rocky III, The A-Team and After

How about, instead of the post-colon The Story of Success after Malcom Gladwell's pre-text Outliers, we substitute:

Outliers:

...A New Age Guide to Sunbathing
...Rural Endurers in an Urban Age
...How Pony Boy Stayed Gold (alright, I know this one's a stretch)

And to wrap the point, Mark R. Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto could just as easily be summed up with

Liberty and Tyranny:

...The Forbidden Love of a French Statue and a T-Rex
...The Making of Metalstorm 2: The Return of Jaryd Syn
...The Auteur Dictatorship of Anchors Aweigh

Seeing that pre-colon text exists strictly for creative reasons (albeit sometimes allegorical or metaphoric statement) one wonders why practice is ever-increasing... 

And so we go back to the beginning. There is purpose in the redundant. In as much as the colon archetype of titling has become a nuisance by its very success, and that the pre-colon text adds nothing substantial to the content indication, why have it at all?

There is enjoyment in words. I can echo the message "love sucks" in two words, two tweets, two paragraphs, two pages, two chapters, two books, or two lifetimes. Tom Waits can do it in gutteral imagery. Shakespeare can do it in ten syllable cadences. And Ezra Pound can wax psychotic in a dozen languages and pictographs to all achieve a similar message.

So while this entire post could've been condensed to "Colons in non-fiction titles maybe trite, but sometimes offer artistic entertainment value", it would have hardly been as fun to write.

An impromptu podcast featuring long-time friend Jeff Barnes waxing under influences on the mismatched pastiche of music and setting in a late night scene from a Lebanese restaurant here in Hamilton, Ontario.
 
A bottle of red, a bottle of white, a horrible musical compilation that should be titled "Slices of Blandness".
 
This podcast marks the marriage of the scripted lovehate podcasts with the impromptu podcasts. Episodes 42 of both are now combined in the new episode 85.

A frank discourse on the idiocy of Gary Bettman, the short-sightedness of the NHL, and why hockey needs to come home to Hamilton, Ontario... okay, you may not care about hockey, or Hamilton, or even know or care about who Gary Bettman is, but if you want to hear me trash talk the Wizard of Idiot for a few minutes, take a listen.
 
Also, if you're one of those "tech news" people, Jim Balsillie's involved, and, for those of you who don't know who he is, he is the CEO of a little outfit called Research in Motion who sell a gadget called Blackberry... not that we'll be talking about app stores or anything, but if the tech geek thing floats your boat, there you go.
 
Check out makeitseven.ca for updates on the saga.

In the past few years of webolution we've dealt with the advances of technologies and platforms that are greeted with great fanfare. What tends to get lost, or at least glossed over as time passes, are some of the ethical questions that arise from the technologies.

Remember when everyone thought Google was the greatest thing ever? Wait... I guess most people still do. There once was a time were the links that popped up for your searches were suspect. Why those links and not others? Was there some grand design that we were unaware of? Was Google harnessing the power of search results, feeding us what they wanted to feed us and instead of an "above board", transparent list of links where my little homepage could ever have a chance of hitting the top of the list? I remember thinking about this once... for a few seconds anyway, and then I got to my searching. I had ceded my link aggregation to Google.

Wikipedia has crowdsourced knowledge to the point where noted journalists are buying into the entries as though they're gospel. We search. We find entries that we can pretty much guarantee are suspect in one regard or another, yet we cite, source, report, and pass off the amalgamated ponderings of others as the 21st century Funk & Wagnall's. Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate the fact that we've moved from an authority system based on printing press to one based on monitor text. I'm not naive enough to think that print encyclopedias were without bias. I do know, however, that the filtering system to go from research, to edit, to publish at a publishing house is at least tangibly more complex than clicking "edit". We have ceded our knowledge to Wikipedia.

And then past year's fears of Digg manipulating their stories to jack up the ratings of "superusers" or otherwise manipulating their front page results. The community cried "Foul!" and most of us went back there anyway.

Let's digress for a minute though...

Google, Wikipedia, Digg - none of them are bound to ANY public recourse or obligation. These are private companies that may be community-driven in some respects, but are beholden to no one but themselves, or their shareholders. Even still, we have ceded authority to the aggregators... and I'm sadly willing to accept it, because their functionality makes my life easier and I'm far too lazy to pursue the alternative.

So now we are presented with Wolfram Alpha which purports to be a "computational knowledge engine" which is way cool and has potential written all over it. But its existence (and future) raises questions concerning our divested authority. While Google and Digg ask us to accept rankings and Wikipedia asks us to accept knowledge, Wolfram Alpha is asking us to accept solutions. While this may seem to be a fine line (and one that I'm sure I'll be accepting sometime soon) the line does lead down the path to bigger ethical questions than link aggregation.

Is it okay to cede problem solving to the web? Don't get me wrong here. I realize that WA is not apt to solve the world's problems even with the best placed query. My fear is that the ourobouros of crowdsourcing will increase exponentially. When does a Wikipedia entry that's received a million hits, because of its listing in Google, become so accepted that it is "fact"? When does "fact" get integrated into research which, itself, gets re-cited back into Wikipedia and other sources? When does Wolfram Alpha generate solutions based on a "fact" that, in itself, gets republished to create new "research"?

And I guess we can go back to the paper v. digital question where I'm sure someone will correctly assert that this feared pattern has all happened before in paper, ink and press. I'll concede to that. My issue is the filtering. Now it can happen in an hour or a day. Research used to be time intensive and subject to the self-questioning that the research and publishing process would allow. The speed of the web CAN deny such reflection. Where it has always been incumbent on consumers of media to question content providers, the obligation becomes even greater when server-side computation verges on impending nascent stages of AI. Alright, I know were not talking Skynet here, but there's a big difference between "here's where you can go to possibly find the answer" and "here's the answer".

Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolfram?