Day: June 30, 2005

Rather than comment in your LJ, I am writing my whole thoughts out here, because I will have more room.

I dunno how much faith i put in internet tarot… an alternative reading to your sequence though:

Central issue — Wheel of Fortune, reversed
Due to a failure or reluctance to exert free will, a great change (which cannot be taken back) is required to break the pattern of your life. The changes will be bad for someone. The central issue being reversed means that you must not only look at how this cycle change affects you, but the other major and minor influences. This portent underlies the dangers of prescience – it reminds us that though we can play the odds, we do not have a choice at what comes of life, only how we can react to life as it comes at us. Making different decisions at any point down the tree will drastically change the outcome of the revolution of the wheel. The unity of the wheel’s circumference is enhanced in this reading by the full cycle of elemental presences within the cross.

Obstacle — King of Wands
I agree that this card probably represents Andrew. Given the circumstance, it fits too well. It could, however, stand for another family member, or, perhaps a co-worker of authority.

Goal — Page of Coins
This represents the ideal you are reaching for, that path to which is impeded by your Obstacle. The focus of this strong earth card is to remain true to the course you set out on (or were perhaps put on by the wheel) in order to attain those ideals, which are most probably rooted in material things (though not necessarily material in the consumer sense). You have had two strong elemental presences at important points in the cross, a pattern to watch for.

Foundation of the situation — Four of Wands (Completion)
This card is tied to your Goal in complimenting form. Perhaps your goal is an offshoot of having a restful emotional state, or perhaps the prosperity of an emotionally secure situation will only be recognizable when the path to your goals are in place. Wither way, the positive outcomes of the linked natures of these cards tie back to the wheel, and your ability to circumnavigate not only what life has thrown you into, but what you have chosen to do as a result of that change in fortune.

Passing influence — Ten of Cups (Satiety), reversed
These all appear to be ramifications of the Central issue, as they relate to the Central issue. This card is significant in it’s transient nature not only because of its strong elemental ties (last low suit of water) but because it’s elemental nature is tied to the position in the read. Passing states of fluid discontent and stagnation offset by lack of fulfillment that have become part of the cycle being presented elementally, and broken by the wheel.

Approaching influence — The Empress
While the recurring elements of success and productivity could again be self-reflection in an approaching influence (perhaps a new manifestation of yourself as you change to meet the path of the wheel), this card could also suggest an increased female presence or influence in your world. These individuals could be represented by this card (your mother or sister perhaps, or people you haven’t met yet), or it could be the ultimate destination you find for yourself visa vie the influence of strong feminine presence in the path ahead of you, particularly someone with Venutian influence in their astrological makeup.

My role/attitude — Eight of Coins (Prudence), reversed
This earth presence is more rooted in the habits being broken by Passing influences and your central issue. It is the reaction to going from a very strong fire presence with a fire based path when ultimately, the root of your goals and hopes lies in earth and water. Perhaps as a result of the longstanding in congruency between the two, you have become imprudent in your habits, seeking retreat and repeated mistakes rather than facing the steepness of the path to your goals.

Surroundings — Strength, reversed
This card accurately depicts the aftermath of the flash point of the central issue in the face of actions and influences. You are at the mercy of the Obstacle, defenseless despite an act of unmitigated strength, but weak against the repetition of the pattern set forth by your attitudes of the past, and passing influences. This card is tied directly to Leo, which chains it inexorably to your Obstacle, and the majority of the conflict in the reading, which seems to be based in fire, and it’s conflict with the elements of your hopeful outcomes in life.

The Unexpected element — Ace of Swords
The elemental cycle is locked down with another poignant elemental presence, in a significantly placed location! The singular presence of strength and air represented by the naked solitary blade is somehow tied to your path (weal or woe). It suggests a hopeful outcome from a hidden location. Ten swords can stand against any obstacle, but with only one sword, wit, planning, intelligence, and allies must be brought into play. This card highlights the suspicion that external influences are going to be significant not only in succeeding in attaining your goals, but that some of these influences are probably, as of yet, unrevealed to you at this time.

Outcome — Three of Swords (Sorrow)
Contextually, the outcome was predetermined before you “flipped” the first card – Andrew’s heart will be broken no matter whether or not you succeed in attempting to attain your goals. Subjectively, the Outcome is tied most strongly to the Central Issue and the Obstacle. In this case, the outcome is born of the Central Issue, and affects not only you, but your obstacle in a central way. Perhaps the secondary significance of the obstacle is not only an impedance towards you attaining the goals you have the potential of succeeding gaining, but how that obstacle will relate to the new patterns which appear to be emerging. The key to preventing a repetition of your passing influences relies on your wits and will, as well as strong feminine influences in your future, and how those influences will mold you, or how you will mold yourself to meeting them.

I wrote a paper for the First International Conference on the Future of the Book in 2003. It was published in some of the conference apocrypha, and I used to have a link to a copy online, but it appears to be one. If I can dig up the proof later, I will repost it.

In that paper, I vigorously defended the need to ensure total portability and maintainability of a digital library. Countless of times over the course of history thought has been pooled by the destruction of a single tome which contained unique thought of the time. When the physical book was gone, the thought was erased, or obscured until rediscovered. Recent work on some of Archimedes’ texts have shown that the ancient Greeks (or at least one of them) knew a whole lot more than we give them credit for. Digital libraries need to have universal form and function, so they can be integrated into a greater collective of knowledge.

My paper argued that the meat of the book, the words, could be captured electronically and flawlessly. This process would preempt the happenstantial destruction of a work, and allow for simple and fast replication and dissemination. Further, with all works eventually becoming digital, cross referencing, indexing, and knowledge slicing would become streamlined to the point where you literally could find the connections between anything.

In Matthew Woodring Stover’s Heroes Die, we are given a fantastic view of what things may become (albeit with an incredible fantastic twist). The idea of purely electronic documents allows for the control of the text, and the ideas behind it. Books are tactile things, and hard to edit seamlessly. Electronic documents are susceptible to revisions without it ever being obvious to the reader, and in certain scenarios, even real time. The use of editions in large-scale publications address this somewhat in terms of being able to track changes across the history of a body of work in paper, but no such device exists for electronic documents in eprint.

The father of the protagonist in the book points out that if you have a printed copy of a book, nobody can twist or change the knowledge in that book without you knowing it. It is a particularly poignant point in the face of the big-brother information control environment, but one which I ultimately threw by the wayside as alarmist claptrap. After all, couldn’t people have been doing such things for years with conventional printing? From what I know about the bookmaking industry, enough things get into works gone to press that are _not_ supposed to be there that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone wanted to play big brother with a white pen, they could do so with relative ease. Perhaps naively, I assume that there will be no one single controlling interest overseeing the entire digital library process. That was why I was so adamant about open standards, so everyone is doing everything the same way, despite the fact that it was not all being done by the same people.

Many of the detracting arguments against eprint are aesthetic. Typeset, font, paper’s tactile value and color. The power of good binding and strong cover (not to mention cover art). All these things, to me, are secondary to the actual work – the words which capture the writer’s intent and pass them on to the reader. Some people can’t get past the actual process of flipping pages and holding a sheaf of paper. To them, I usually say, get over it.

Today was the first time, however, that something occurred to me which was a spot-on argument against eprint.

Steganography.

Not the new fangled hard core digital pixel manipulation encoding we all know and love thanks to media mongers after 9/11. I’m talking about the old school stuff. The stuff of the 14th and 15th century, which _I_ know and love.

All old textual stegnographic works that I have ever done any work on are all contextually based. That means that font type and placement, graphic placement and where that graphic related to the page count, chapter breaks etc, as well as the spacing of columns and tabs were absolutely integral to the ability to decode ANYTHING. Granted, some works (like Trithemius’ stuff, and Wolfgang Heidel’s writings) can be brute forced mathematically if you have the sequences and apply the correct pattern.

But, for true textual steganography, there is too much contextual nuance to be captured digitally, unless you do image scans. Image scans are something I am totally against, because of quality control issues, storage size, and the inability to tag them in a reliable manner with minimal human interaction (and therefore chance of error).

What this has made me realize is that most books are soulless things. They are little more than sentences and paragraphs of sinew and meat slapped over a skeletons of chapters and sections. However, in certain cases, the actual artifice of the book gives a physical work a soul. This is particularly the case in pre-printing press works, but there are clear exceptions to that generalization.

When the soul of such a book is to encapsulate a hidden meaning or message, the translation to electronic media in an elegant format seems too daunting a task to contemplate. Combined with the actual loss of the artifact itself as the de-facto source of experience (see the Archimides link above), I am now beginning to wonder if perhaps I need to revise my outlook on the significance of implementing true digital collections.

All this on less than three hours sleep! What have you done with your morning?