2/24/94 11:45 pm
Home again. One glass and one attempt to install Newton software on Mac.
Tammikuu 1994
Oh shit, the software is on high density floppies. Which means I shall instead
take Newton to bed with me to see if it fulfils the basic need, why I bought it in the
first place..”

5/9/94 8:26 pm
Good that I masturbated already. I must take the particle sheets and consider each case separately again. Have thought about calling the cannabis supply. A fax went, I hope, to Mr Fantini. The beard is somewhat unpleasant. She closed the far side kitchen door. Newton seems to replace smoking. I can imagine a backlit colour Newton. Maybe a short walk after they leave. Both have pissed now. The blonde…

Today I intend to buy a bottle of wine. Very slowly I am beginning to understand
the page layout logic of Newton.

Between 1994 and 1996 Kurenniemi wrote copious notes on the Newton. Between business meetings, on trains, in bed at night, Kurenniemi pushed the portability of the device to the edge, despite it’s somewhat ungainly size and lack of backlighting (he talks of needing a new bedside lamp to help him to note at night). Clearly the device excited Kurenniemi and his use is at least in part driven by this excitement. The messages are short, typically written in between his other activities in the day and often commenting upon them.

Reading Kurenniemi’s Newton notes reminds the reader of Kurenniemi’s prescience. Not just on surface details (like his anticipation of a backlit color screen which or course maps neatly to todays “retinal” smartphone displays), but also in terms of his use of the device, literally taking it to bed with him, and a ritual use, like cigarettes, to compulsively document in short notes mixing personal and public. The texts have a clear analog with today’s “tweets” or micro-blogging practices.

It’s also striking how the Newton fits in to Kurenniemi’s compulsions and substances; use of the Newton is itself a kind of “new drug” (replacement to smoking) in addition to a tool to procure more (he’s using the Newton’s capacity for sending fax documents to arrange some cannabis delivery). At times, the line between substance and software, device and user blurs: “Newton had recognition problems, hangover I must have changed settings last night Now a few more pages.”

Grep is one of the basic “command-line” tools provided in GNU/Linux; one “pipes” a file into it with some textual pattern to search for and the program outputs only those lines containing the text to the screen, highlighting in color the matches. We use the tool on a text dump (itself obtained by another utility that extracts just the text content from the PDF), and search for the term “Newton”:

As with many technologies, at some point the excitement fades and another comes to takes it place. In 1996, the rising tide of the Web seems to overtake Kurenniemi’s attention.

11.4.1996 21:05
I got the sick idea of writing everything, from now on, in HTML. For security I shall not put my name anywhere here. Juuso visited. We searched all boxes at the attic, for leads and dates for his book. Very little was found. I took down all calendars and promised to scan them for relevant dates. I’ll begin that now.

Two annotated interviews with Perttu Rastas, of the Finnish Archive, and Kati, Kurenniemi’s wife and long-time partner. Apologies for the partial / spotty transcriptions.

Dear XXXX,

By sending you this letter, I accept that the social conventions of language are stronger than whatever I can think of telling you.

Yours,

YYYY

Replace XXXX by the name of the person who should receive this letter and YYYY by yours.

Using a template usually means we rely on the most deeply entrenched social conventions to choose the form of the message we want to deliver. Templates usually define for us thin margins of possible variations. These are the holes we are suppose to fill in.

How then to interpret the desire of Kurenniemi to make a digital backup of his life as a template for all human life? At first sight, this proposition sounds worrying. Looking at the digital backup however, there is nothing remotely similar to one would expect from a template. There is hardly anything that looks like a template with predefined holes. Where should this structure come from, then? Should it have been designed by Kurenniemi these last years and was he taken by surprise when he had his stroke? Is the structure absent because of a lack of time? Or is this structure to be sorted through by a quantum computer out of the organic collection of documents copied on the hard drives?

Or should we consider that this very lack of ‘templateness’ is itself a very strong indication of what a template for all human life could be? Should we consider that the always partial, always interrupted connections that exist between these documents, the irregular redundancy, the opportunism of choosing sometimes a format for what is made for and sometimes just for the opposite are clues that suggest where to look when we want to rethink our idea of a structure?
When Kurenniemi presents these documents as a base for a template for human life, does he expect an emerging order to come out of them and be valid universally? Or is he begging us to apprehend an impossible order that couldn’t provide stable connections, and consider this as the necessary first step for anyone who wants to create an archive for any human life?

When doing face recognition, the classifier that we use, the Haar classifier first proposed by Paul Viola and improved by Rainer Lienhart, executes a series of tests on the image. As we have seen previously, the algorithm makes a good work at detecting faces. It however includes portions of images that do not quite match our usual idea of what a face is. These are named false positives.

Far from being random, these faces detected by the algorithm show us how the representation of faces is haunting any image.
If we sometimes see faces in the clouds, why the algorithms couldn’t find faces in places we don’t expect to find them?

Linux includes a command called time, which rather than reporting the current time (that’s “date”), is a kind of meta command that can be used to measure the resource usage of the execution of another command.

Running the hash index function I’ve been working on today took all of 244 minutes (in “real” time) — not yet sure what “user” vs “system” time exactly means but imagine it has to do with the way my computer divides it’s resources among the various processes going on in parallel to the timed task.

Not surprisingly, by the time the original command finished, I had already discovered and fixed a bug in the script so it’s time to run the script again

http://ss64.com/bash/time.html

In this file, called “Neural code Nature”, Erkki seems to have stored a quotation from an academic paper on Neural Nets.

…The preceding section explained how an archive is created due to the work of a college or any officer, how the archive is always the reflection of the functions of that body (organisation) or that official. An archive is not random, as in the collection of this or that historical manuscript, despite the fact that such a collection is sometimes called an archive. On the contrary, an archive is an organic whole, a living organism that grows consistently, forming and deforming. Changing the functions of the college, changes the nature of the archive as well. The rules, which govern the composition, establishment, and formation of an archive, can not be previously identifies by the archivist, it is only through studying and noting the organism, that the rules, to which it has formed can be observed. Each archive has as it were its own personality, individuality, to which the archivist must become acquainted.

Handleiding voor het Ordenen en beschrijven van archieven, Muller, Feith, Fruin, p. 5, 1920 Second Printing

Original Text:

In de vorige paragraaf is uiteengezet hoe een archief ontstaat ten gevolge van de werkzaamheden van een college of een ambtenaar, hoe het archief altijd de neerslag is der functiën van dat college of dien ambtenaar. Een archief wordt dus niet willekeurig gemaakt, gelijk men de eene of andere verzameling historische handschriften samenstelt, al wordt zulk eene verzameling wel eens een archief genoemd. … Integendeel, een archief is een organisch geheel, een levend organisme, dat volgens vaste regelen groeit, zich vormt en vervormt. Veranderen de functiën van het college, de aard van het archief verandert mede. De regels, die de samenstelling, de inrichting, de vorming van een archief beheerschen, kan dus de archivaris niet van te voren vaststellen; hij kan alleen het organisme bestudeeren en constateeren, welke de regels zijn, waarnaar het zich heeft gevormd. Elk archief heeft dus als het ware zijne eigene persoonlijkheid, zijne individualiteit, die de archivaris moet leeren kennen.

Man is a machine. A machine produced by evolution. I find it impossible to think that for mere nostalgic reasons, such a slime-based system would be preserved.

[...]

Having been mostly apolitical, except for slow drift from mild zen-marxism to still milder liberal anarchism, I now have a cause. The ideology of sustainable development is too slippery, because it does not specify absolute limits to change. I want to sharpen sustainable development into the Museum Planet Earth idea.
Briefly, this says that in step with the transhumanist fall into the singularity, in less than a 100 years, we should make the planet Earth into a museum. This means asymptotically stopped change in resident human population, biodiversity, biosphere, environmental chemistry, climate, and so on.
But, everything will be allowed: economic expansion, population explosion through stopping of ageing, genetic manipulation, genetic and nanotechnologies of unimaginable powers, warfare and worse, in space. A deal?
To make this utopian future more acceptable, I briefly describe its econopolitics. In 2100, for example, print 10 billion “ Earth licences”and distribute them to all then living humans. No more licences will ever be printed. Licences can be sold. This way, the people that want long life and long-lived children can have them, but only through migrating to space. This will be cheap because there will be people wanting to stay down here, purchasing Earth licences to a price that will plentily cover the price of the lift to orbit for the seller.

Checking the archive for .nb or .cdf format files revealed that Kurenniemi made much use of Mathematica for making all kinds of records, the find command returns 5104 .nb files (possibly including duplicated files).

A glimpse through Kurenniemi’s mathematica files (some “demo”/example files authored by others and some clearly created by himself) seem to cross many aspects of his life from
mathematica interests:
./Kurenniemi/CD_archive/arkisto_QRZB/Function automata/Function automata 7L.nb
research questions:
./Kurenniemi/Homecomputer/-Work/-Theory/RCA/RCA97/Digital Spacetime/DS1.nb
music / DIMI:
./Kurenniemi/CD_archive/QRZB030610/Music/Dimi/Dimi 3.nb
personal relations:
./Kurenniemi/CD_archive/ME/naiset01/Anne/Anne at her best 1.nb

Looking at the files, it seems that Kurenniemi used the program simply as a structured noteook and outliner, cataloging his collected notes from a lecture, or cataloging a collection of images of a lover. Kurenniemi also seemed to cut and paste material (from the web?) as a means of archiving interesting material. From the CDFPlayer application, there seems to be no export formats, other than indirectly by printing, then saving this as a PDF file. Fortunately, looking at the “raw” files reveals that they are generally speaking simple text files, with minimal structural markup.

Mathematica-Compatible Notebook

This notebook can be used on any computer system with Mathematica 4.0,
MathReader 4.0, or any compatible application. The data for the notebook
starts with the line containing stars above.

To get the notebook into a Mathematica-compatible application, do one of
the following:

* Save the data starting with the line of stars above into a file
with a name ending in .nb, then open the file inside the application;

* Copy the data starting with the line of stars above to the
clipboard, then use the Paste menu command inside the application.

Data for notebooks contains only printable 7-bit ASCII and can be
sent directly in email or through ftp in text mode. Newlines can be
CR, LF or CRLF (Unix, Macintosh or MS-DOS style).

NOTE: If you modify the data for this notebook not in a Mathematica-
compatible application, you must delete the line below containing the
word CacheID, otherwise Mathematica-compatible applications may try to
use invalid cache data.

For more information on notebooks and Mathematica-compatible
applications, contact Wolfram Research:
web: http://www.wolfram.com
email: info@wolfram.com
phone: +1-217-398-0700 (U.S.)

Notebook reader applications are available free of charge from
Wolfram Research.
***********************************************************************)

(*CacheID: 232*)