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Silent Movie Heroin of The Late 1900s

/ Adam / 1 Comment

Most films are really little more than stage plays with more atmosphere and action. I think that the scope and flexibility of movie stories would be greatly enhanced by borrowing something from the structure of silent movies where points that didn’t require dialog could be presented by a shot and a title card. Something like: Title: Billy’s uncle. Picture: Uncle giving Billy ice cream. In a few seconds, you could introduce Billy’s uncle and say something about him without being burdened with a scene. This economy of statement gives silent movies a much greater narrative scope and flexibility than we have today. 

  — Stanley Kubrick, 1981

For example, this well known 1997 silent work.

I’m not saying Kubrick’s wrong. I suspect there has instead been a return to silent movie techniques. Soon after this quote, Kubrick flags advertisements for their similar power and concision, and elsewhere he defends the use of voiceovers in Barry Lyndon. Music videos can arguably be put in a similar category. As a side effect of the commercial relevance of such things, directors of the last twenty years are trained with a cinematic toolkit shared with silent films. It is a kind of marvelous revival in disguise.

Boyle’s style has been described as a long music video – which could, at a stretch, also apply to something like Lang’s Metropolis.

In another fun parallel, there’s an innovative use of subtitling in the very metropolitan Slumdog Millionaire. Instead of confining himself to the bottom strip of screen Boyle inserts colourful inter-titles at visual locations that serve the construction of the shot.

When our ancestors – silent movies – the first time they watched locomotive trains pass across the screen they screamed. — Danny Boyle

XIV.3 When the way prevails in a system

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子曰，邦有道，危言，危行。邦无道，危行，孙言。 ‘ — 论语，十四:三

The Master said, ‘When the Way prevails in the state, speak and act with perilous high-mindedness; when the Way does not prevail, act with perilous high-mindedness but speak with self-effacing diffidence.’ — Analects XIV.3 (Lau)

Confucius expresses not only a prudent guideline for ethical public service, but a principle for designing robust systems across diverse interfaces. Consider The Way prevailing in a trustable system: one you control, or one well established, open and of high quality. In these circumstances it is possible and desirable to do strict validation on subtly incorrect inputs, and to raise exceptions internally without fear of further system failure.

A bureaucracy is an information processing system of communicating agents. At the external endpoints of this system it can, through interfaces, have physical and social effects. Likewise, software is a bureaucracy of automatons. This is especially evident when the software system is decomposed into independently processing agents, as in concurrent or distributed systems. External effects depend on the system: a state may build a road, or put a man in jail; software may fly a plane, or a missile.

Such decoupled or distributed systems then have non-trivial needs for design of the communication protocol itself. This manifests, in traditional bureaucracy, as paper forms. Paper (or equivalent) is now seen as a technological pre-requisite for centralized state formation across larger geographic and demographic scales because it is an enabler for efficient central bureaucracy (eg Whitmore chapter on Dai Viet). In the time of Confucius the state ran on more unwieldy scrolls, but the problems of information flow in the state system are shared.

Facing similar problems of information design, Confucius gives similar advice to Jon Postel:

TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. RFC 761

Postel is perhaps more forgiving than Confucius, here. If a program must deal with badly formed inputs, The Way does not prevail in the system. If it tries too hard to be liberal in it’s interpretation of inputs, rather than logging an error, rejecting or ignoring the input, it is more prone to subversion. One could say the system does not act with perilous high-mindedness in maintaining its internal state.

The langsec group have a variation on the principle which bears even greater similarity: “Be definite about what you accept”. Log an error if you can, they might have added; else speak with self-effacing diffidence.

How To Write About Islam

/ Adam / 1 Comment

Substitute, combine and conflate Islam, Arabs and the Middle East. Only twenty percent of Muslims are Arabs. The Middle East has plenty of other ethnic groups. The biggest Muslim majority country is Indonesia, which is further from Mecca than London is. Use whichever group is convenient for your point, or fits better for the copy desk.

Rely on antiquity to explain causes. Origin stories are great for comic books and history. Rely on them. The Hidden Imam hides TV remote controls all the time: be sure to put him at the centre of all geopolitical debates as well.  Arguments and schisms are ideal forms free from a context of time and space, so leap happily across multiple centuries for connections or conclusions. Any contrary examples or entire flourishing empires that happen to chronologically fall in between two steps in your argument can be safely ignored. Wars and treaties of the 19th and 20th centuries are also too recent to offer the broad vista your readers need.

Poetry is sewn like a silken thread throughout Islamic culture; the Qur’an is sometimes described as a poem dictated by Allah, the unique, the mighty. The poetic Muslim soul should not be sullied by description with brutish numbers. Economic or demographic details are tedious grey filler in your portrait of the spiritual world of Islam.

Use generalized definite articles a few times to give the article a sense of scholarly generality. If at all possible, discuss The Muslim as a noun, but if not, at least deploy general terms as adjectives, like The Muslim Mind, Islamic Civilization, or that notoriously opinionated piece  of civil engineering, The Arab Street.

Praise your subject and their generous traditions of hospitality to guests, at least when you’re not talking about how nasty and self-explosive they are.

Call for an Islamic Reformation. Don’t let the lack of an Islamic Pope deter you. European religious and political history translates simply into the Near, Middle and Far East.

Turbans and burqas. Oh yeah.

If you must use references, restrict them to a single source, preferably Bernard Lewis. Lewis is a Princeton scholar with vast experience and erudition, particularly on the Ottoman Empire. His political punditry and close association with the American government don’t need further attention. There’s certainly no need to mention any abstruse academic debates he’s been involved in.

Draw to an expansive and general conclusion about Islam as a whole, eschewing pedantically specific elements. Look into your heart. In the end, like Islam, writers need to find solutions within themselves.

((This guide is indebted to How To Write About Africa and a huge corpus of inspirational articles in the Anglophone press.))

A White Horse Is Not A Horse

/ Adam / 1 Comment

　　 曰：马者，所以命形也；白者，所以命色也。命色者非名形也。故曰：“白马非马”。
— 公孙龙子

‘Horse’ is that by which we name the shape. ‘White’ is that by which we name the color. Naming the color is not naming the shape. So white horse is not horse.
  — Gongsun Longzi

public class Horse extends Shape{
 ...
}

public class WhiteHorse extends Horse implements Colourable
{
  public Colour getColour(){ return Colours.WHITE; }

  public boolean equals( Object other ){
    if ( !other instanceof WhiteHorse){
      return false; 
    }
    ...
  }
}

public class AnotherWhiteHorse{

  public Shape getShape(){ return ShapeConstants.HORSE; }

  public Colour getColour(){ return Colours.WHITE; }

}


public class Argument{
  public static void main(String[] args){
    Horse horse = new Horse();
    WhiteHorse whiteHorse = new WhiteHorse();
    AnotherWhiteHorse anotherWhiteHorse = new AnotherWhiteHorse();
    log.info( whiteHorse == Horse.class );
    log.info( WhiteHorse.class == Horse.class );
    log.info( WhiteHorse.class.equals( Horse.class ) );
    log.info( whiteHorse == horse );
    log.info( whiteHorse.equals ( horse ) );
    log.info( anotherWhiteHorse == horse );
    log.info( anotherWhiteHorse.equals ( horse ) );
    log.info( anotherWhiteHorse instanceof Horse.class );
    log.info( "Therefore white horse is not horse" );
  }
}

Encapsulation Variations

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The Chinese annals relate that when the armies of Kublai Khan invaded, several tribal tu’ssu, in particular the Hani or He-man, offered prolonged resistance. In this context the walled city of Mojiang or Ta-lang (Akha: Tm-lang) is mentioned (Mojiang Editorial Committee, 1983). Full occupation of Yunnan and submission of the Wu-man, He-man. and Yung Barbarians was achieved slowly in bloody wars between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This culminated in the Yunnan war between 1855-1873 in which the tribal peoples of the south-western border areas joined a rebellion of the Islamic Haw Chinese (ed: Hui 回族) against Manchu rule. The rebellion was also triggered by the danger of infiltration by Western colonial powers through China’s ‘back-door’, Yunnan, and its fabulous resources. This is confirmed by French and British sources. The British had occupied Burma. The French had brought the ‘miracles’ of French ‘civilization’ to Cochin China in the form of a rigid system of taxation and forced labour. In Yunnan they found an impoverished and desperate population, oppressed by Hani or Tai tu’ssu and Chinese administrators (Scott and Hardiman, 1900; Bonifacy, I904; Henry. I903; Madrolle. 1925; Vial. 1917).

Over many centuries, therefore, the more inaccessible parts of mountainous southern Yunnan, and neighbouring Vietnam, Laos, and Burma became the ‘zonas de refugio’ for tribal groups marginalized by the smaller vassal states which occupied the lowland aras. In this process of marginalization, tribal groups such as the Hani and Akha also selected and constructed their habitats — in terms of altitude and surrounding forestation – in such a way that they would not be easily accessible to soldiers, bandits, and tax-collectors. Such processes have been termed ‘encapsulation’ (Douglas, 1965). They led in this case to differentiation in dialect and forms of dress. In parallel, however, they developed a distinctive unifying social and political structure. which I have called an ‘ethnic alliance system’.
— Leo Alting von Gesau, Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System in Turton (ed.) Civility and savagery: social identity in Tai States

Contrast a personally more familiar usage: data and methods need to be forcibly constrained over time to stay within the control of the engineer of the system.

This is not an attempt at etymology. I would guess the source of the computer science definition is more likely via chemistry.

I found the quote in another book, and due to the weirdly patchy nature of google books was able to find the source of the quote but not of the original term encapsulation as used by Douglas in 1965. Only the first page of the bibliography of Civility and savagery: social identity in the Tai states is available online. I wonder if this is due to a little sloppiness in scanning. I can imagine the impatient intern thinking “who reads bibliographies anyway, all the content is already over”. Or perhaps it’s the fault of some weird copyright terms condition analogous to the text-as-unicode text being present for search but not accessible to copy and paste, so getting back to text requires using FreeOCR. I’m not even sure who Douglas is – some second guessing suggests perhaps Mary Douglas, who did write about construction of excluded groups, but didn’t publish a book that year and whose Purity and Danger from a year later doesn’t contain the word encapsulation. It’s very weird having the science fictional awesomeness of Google books at your fingertips, but having to search a library like a really long Word document, when the hyperlink equivalent (ie, a reference) could be right there.

At any rate, without a physical copy of the book in a library I can access, Douglas’ definitive coining has gone 404 and the brave digital world of Google books has worse linkrot than a standard academic bibliography. I guess their hrefs are a little too thoroughly encapsulated.