git ssb

title: "Introduction" date: 2007-07-09 13:45 series: Walking Dataloss

tags: assumptions, decay, Flickr, imperfection, meta, Mooquackwooftweetmeow, perception, The Twaddle, Walking Dataloss

<p>So… This blog's going to be centred around the idea of decay and how it affects our perception. And then how that leads to assumptions, and illogical categorisations (putting things into boxes where they don't belong).</p>
<p>I'm already guilty after one sentence—to whom does “our” apply? Just me? Me and a few friends? Me and you? (Hi! by the way.) Every person alive today? Every human <em>including</em> the dead and yet-to-be-born? Every mammal? Every <em>animal</em>? Or absolutely <em>every</em> living being including plants and such?</p>
<p>Yeah. Tough one.</p>
<p>Of necessity, I'm going to have to reduce generalisations to only those that apply to <em>me</em>. Generally, though, I'm going to try to challenge assumptions by stretching applicability to the widest sense possible.</p>
<p>I'm <em>not</em> going to criticise directed writing or speech in English for assuming the audience is human—at the time of writing, only humans can understand English beyond a few words—but I <em>will</em> use <i>things being assumed when they shouldn't be</i> as starting points for wider thoughts.</p>
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<p>I've written about this sort of stuff before—simplistic things like my <a href="/arantaboutforeigners">“rant about foreigners”</a> in which I complained about an American website using units of measure that were familiar to <em>them</em>, but that a wider, non-American audience found awkward or even incomprehensible. I've also written about <a href="/planetx4">what's in the solar system</a>, trying to use language that most objectively describes the <em>reality</em> of what's there, as well as removing the historical misemphasis particularly of Pluto, but also of the “major planets”. (I only <em>just</em> realised that that entry was relevant to this.)</p>
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<p>A lot of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/">my pictures on Flickr</a> have a theme of decay and imperfection. In <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/444944463/">Four</a> (I use <a href="http://forwardrussia.com/">¡Forward, Russia!</a> nomenclature for the pictures I publish) I tried to make a picture of a murky sky over Hartlepool (Great Britain, Earth etc.) look bright and sunny; the result has a clear air of artificiality (quite possibly due to my lack of <a href="http://gimp.org/">GIMP</a> mojo).</p>
<p>For <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/698883218/">Ten</a>, I drew around the photo by hand, sloppily, creating an outline that was clearly produced in this way. Both of these were an attempt to highlight how the reality of what I photographed gets <em>filtered</em> en route from the camera to the viewer, by artificially filtering the pictures even more; and in the case of Ten, by intentionally introducing imperfections.</p>
<p>As another example of me playing with imperfections, I began my Thirteen series by focusing on the most obvious imperfection the camera recorded (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/700208520/">part 1</a>)—the overexposure of the Sun. I then focused on the same area but with the imperfection removed and the sky recoloured to blue, the colour you'd expect of a sky; the resulting picture (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/700208550/">part 3</a>) is—in my opinion—less interesting than part 1. And finally, I couldn't bring myself to “waste” such a good photo (again, my opinion, of course) by not publishing the full thing as it was “supposed” to look (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregknicholson/700208572/">part 4</a>)—an example of the valiant fight against decay.</p>
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<p>One more thing: there's an article on <a href="/thetwaddle">The Twaddle</a>, a now-mostly-defunct website I run, about the English language (indeed any language) being an intrinsically <em>imperfect</em> representation of what the speaker is trying to express; it argues that this imperfection, the nuances that are applied to any perception that passes through a brain, ought to be appreciated. <a href="/thetwaddle/english">00101 01110 00111 01100 01001 10011 01000 01001 10011 00011 01111 01111 01100</a> wasn't written by me (the author now prefers to remain anonymous for unstalkability reasons) but it probably comes closest to the type of thing I intend to write about on this blog. <p>(By the way, earlier, “our” applied to anything that <em>can</em> perceive, which I <em>think</em> means any animal.)</p>