DO YOU feel uneasy when you delete files from your computer? Does it seem
somehow wrong to consign all those once-valued words to a state of nonexistence,
simply by pressing a button on your keyboard?
If so, help is at hand. A Buddhist monk in Japan has set up a virtual temple
on the Internet to take applications to have memorial services performed for
software that has become useless, business projects that have failed and
information that has been 鈥渓ost鈥� or deleted.
Shokyu Ishiko, who is the chief priest of the Daioh Temple in Kyoto, has
dedicated the virtual 鈥淚nformation Temple鈥� to Manjusri, the Buddhist incarnation
of wisdom. Ishiko, who also has a doctorate in agriculture, will host the first
of his memorial services for lost information at his real temple on 24 October.
He will also offer counselling on spiritual issues at the Internet site.
Advertisement
So long as it hasn鈥檛 been lost, the virtual temple is at
http://www.thezen.or.jp
WE WERE intrigued by a recent report on the BBC Radio 4 programme
Today, which contained a stark revelation of the havoc wrought by global
warming. 鈥淲e are experiencing,鈥� an interviewee warned listeners, 鈥渢he longest
two-year drought ever.鈥�
Feedback is worried.
EACH YEAR, the journal Philosophy and Literature and its
Internet discussion group, PHIL-LIT, sponsor a bad writing contest, with the aim
of locating the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly
book or article published in the past few years.
Announcing the winners of this year鈥檚 contest, the sponsors point out: 鈥淭he
fame and influence of writers such as Hegel, Heidegger or Derrida rests in part
on their mysterious impenetrability. On the other hand, as a cynic once
remarked, John Stuart Mill never attained Hegel鈥檚 prestige because people found
out what he meant. This is a mistake the authors of our prizewinning passages
seem determined to avoid.鈥�
The first prize this year goes to the distinguished scholar Fredric Jameson
for the very first sentence of his book Signatures of the Visible
(Routledge, 1990): 鈥淭he visual,鈥� Jameson informs us, 鈥渋s essentially
pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination;
thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to
betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy
from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more
thankless effort to discipline the viewer).鈥�
Feedback enjoyed the mysterious impenetrability of this sentence a lot, but
if anything was even more impressed by the sheer opaqueness of the winner of the
second prize, Rob Wilson, who wrote this in a collection called The
Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public
Sphere, edited by Richard Burt 鈥渇or the Social Text Collective鈥� (University
of Minnesota Press, 1994):
鈥淚f such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject,
his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate
need to be decoded as the `now-all-but-unreadable DNA鈥� of a fast
deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral
negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting
regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others
of the inner city.鈥�
Social Text, by the way, is the cultural studies journal made famous
by publishing physicist Alan Sokal鈥檚 jargon-ridden parody of postmodernist
writing. As the bad writing contest organisers point out, if Wilson鈥檚 essay is
Social Text鈥檚 idea of scholarship, little wonder it fell for Sokal鈥檚
hoax.
WHY DO ostrich chicks adore moonlight? Is it anything to do with their
parents鈥� habit of burying their heads in the sand? Feedback does not know. We
merely report the findings of recent research in South Africa which, according
to a letter in The Veterinary Record, suggests that the ostrich chick
has an innate desire to seek out moonlight and sleep under its rays.
This yearning can be stronger than the desire to sleep under the heat lamp
provided by thoughtful ostrich farmers鈥� so much so that some farmers hang
a low-wattage yellow bulb next to where the ostrich chicks sleep at night. This
imitation moon has a calming effect on the chicks, who appear more contented and
sleep better under its rays.
ONE OF the joys of computers is how easy they make it to do things
that you didn鈥檛 intend to do at all, with consequences that can range from
peculiar to disastrous. With just a few keystrokes, you can dispatch a megabyte
or two of data to whoever you want. With just a few wrong keystrokes, you can
clog the electronic mailboxes of unsuspecting and unintended recipients around
the world.
That鈥檚 what happened to people on the the International Astronomical Union
mailing list late last month. An amateur astronomer who had subscribed to the
list didn鈥檛 redirect his subscription when he left his job, so the circulars
still went to the same computer. Meanwhile, a colleague in his old office who
was unfamiliar with the machine tried to send him a large file for a consulting
project.
Somehow, the colleague managed to copy the mailing to the whole IAU list.
Some recipients鈥� computers apparently rejected the surplus 1.7 megabytes, but
others dutifully spent 10 minutes or more downloading the giant file, leaving
the bemused astronomers scratching their heads over where it came from and why
it had been sent to them.
HERE IS another example of a manufacturer鈥檚 instruction with a firm grasp of
the obvious. A colleague in reader David Clapham鈥檚 office in Bradford recently
brought in a cake they had been given. It was a rich chocolate cake from
Scotland and packed in a tin. The advice on the tin stated: 鈥淲e recommend you
cut this cake using a sawing motion with a knife with a serrated edge.鈥�
IN A similar vein, Jeremy Clarke recently bought a new iron made
by Rowenta. He was relieved when the instruction accompanying it finally
explained why he had suffered so many years of torment and pain over his
ironing: 鈥淲arning! Never iron clothes on the body!鈥�