One thing that has been pretty much a constant in my life is the regular attempts I observe at cultural stigma by condemning someone to be a fan of "bad music". Of course, this type of cultural stigma is no different from other kinds of stigma based mechanisms that play a part in the daily social power struggles and hustles over group membership.

But it's interesting to me that it works despite how flawed it is. Obviously, the premise for the "bad music" stigma is that we all agree on some common standard for what makes good music. This may have been possible in the past, with three radio stations to choose from and little selection in a record store. But today, with the amount of choice we have, and especially among people who discover music online, it just isn't.

You just can't make a meaningful statement about bad music when just about every person you meet has something in their collection that's just awful. And half the people (or more) consider this something a cornerstone of their collection.

As far as I'm concerned, metal was invented to help us agree on the definition of bad music. But that's actually not the whole story. It turns out that if you take groups like Metallica and Linkin Park, and make them stfu, they do sometimes produce interesting instrumental music. It's just that all the yelling gets in the way.

There are subtler examples. Take Katie Melua. She has a nice voice, her melodies are pleasant, nothing wrong with her it would seem. But then you hear the lyrics. And I often don't even notice (or care) about the lyrics, but hers are so simple minded and annoying that I can't stand it. Same goes for Maria Mena.

And so forth.

But the practical impossibility of a consensus is not even the biggest problem with the "bad music" category. The more serious problem is that we still don't know why or how music affects the brain. In the future, perhaps, we will know why particular harmonies or rhythms induce a positive response. And composers over the ages have surely understood this intuitively, using precisely those "atoms" of composition that please us. But noone has been able to explain why those. So for the time being, musical taste can only be a purely subjective matter. And "bad music" continues to be a contradiction in terms.

Tell me how many times you've seen this. A guy is talking to a room full of people. He wants to do a quick poll, like "how many people are familiar with..". So he asks his question, but while he's doing that he raises his hand.

What the hell is this about? I mean what is the message here? "I don't know where *you* are from, but around here we raise our hand in a situation like this." Is that what it means? What else could it be? Is the guy really thinking 'Well, in case there are some people here who have never been among other people before...'? Is he worried everyone is gonna yell out all at once?

What does it say about us if we really need this cue? Is this mode of response really that hard to figure out? Are there people in the room thinking "I want to give a positive response, but damn if I can figure out how to do it"? If a guy is sitting in the room who doesn't know how to respond, and he sees people around him raising their hands, does he need this additional confirmation?

The strange thing is I don't remember seeing this in the past. Somehow we all seemed to know how this works in the past. I mean if anything you would expect everyone would know this "new thing" by now. Next thing you know, the guy is gonna start saying "See my hand in this position? This is what I want you to do if you want to give a positive response."

Have you ever noticed the way in which adults talk to little kids? I say talk to because it's completely one way. It's a conversation that doesn't happen anywhere else. Kids up to a certain age are too young to assert themselves. It's not that they can't talk, they just don't have any comments to make. They haven't watched enough tv, heard enough gossip or seen enough popular culture to be fluent in the conversations. Kids do not talk for the sake of talking itself, adults do.

So when an adult talks to a kid of say 2 years of age, or 4, it's a constant stream of inanities. And there seems to be an unwritten rule that says when you meet a kid you have to talk. It's a precious opportunity for the adult to yap away without being judged on what he's saying. "Look at how big you are!" I may only have been alive for four years, but I've figured out that we have such a thing as growth. Adults talk to kids like they're idiots because adults have this urge to play idiots. They think "hey, a kid, what a wonderful opportunity to escape the judgment of my peers". And adults of all ages agree on this, they're just as eager to be around little kids whether they're 30 or 80.

This wouldn't be happening if the kid said "I'll have to stop you there buster, what you just said doesn't make any sense". The adult, after recovering from the stunning blow, would mutter "you're a clever one aren't you" and turn around on his heel. Victory! But this is not gonna happen.

See, adults *know* that kids that age don't have the confidence to talk back. There are so many factors in their favor. They're 3 times taller, have a deep voice, have the approval of all the other adults, aren't treated as kids by everyone. So if a kid doesn't have the confidence to engage in small talk, he's definitely not gonna have the courage to criticize. In fact, that's what the liberation of puberty is all about. Finally you have the courage to criticize all the things that have been pissing you off since the start.

But that's not what I do. I don't like the talking. Why should I talk when the other person isn't? Kids have this curious gaze in their eyes which is very conducive to mind games. "Does he think that I think that.."

I'm often amazed at our natural ability to handle information. I know that we make a big deal out of google's ability to find things (and it is a bit deal). But our natural ability to contextualize, and just as crucially to hide information, is unlike anything man has built so far. Just imagine what would happen if your brain showed you all the information it has, spread across the living room floor. You would not only completely forget what you were doing, you'd also never be able to find anything ever again.

We have tried to emulate this contextual ability through what we like to call modes, or profiles, or presets. Fancy cars have the ability to tune the ride either for speed, or for comfort. Digital watches have modes of operation, so when you want use the stopwatch all the other displays vanish and you're in stopwatch mode. The idea is that you change one setting, the mode, and that triggers a whole range of sensible contextual settings appropriate to that mode.

There is definitely a lot of modal functionality in our visual perception. For instance, we can't perceive a very wide spectrum of luminosity, so when you go into a dark you room your eyes need to adjust. And in that mode, if you look at something very bright, it will blind you. You won't be able to see anything else. Another example is the way we see patterns. Most of the time, when you have your eyes open, you see the same level of detail all the time. It might be interesting to ask whether your eyes might be seeing more than your brain decides to "show" you. Again, hiding unnecessary information is valuable. But if you really look closely at something, even from the same distance, you begin to notice things that your "regular" vision doesn't see. Little details appear, details that are not generally "important" to the way you look at it, but since you've switched to detail mode, you now see them. Patterns in the material, shadows on an uneven surface, spots where the material is scratched.

I like to call this mode the cleaning eye. Have you ever noticed that when you start cleaning everything looks different? The cleaning eye is one particular mode that has to do with analyzing the surface and spotting things on the surface that are not part of the surface. We are not very sophisticated at this, there is one way to make a determination. It's called the cleaning test. Try to clean it, and if it comes loose, it's dirt. If it's dirt, then you know that everything else on this surface that looks like that is also dirt. This test can give misleading results. (Have you ever used a cleaning liquid that was too potent, and you ended up damaging the surface you were supposed to be cleaning?)

What's interesting to me about the cleaning eye is the emotional responses that go with it. There are two opposing forces. On the one hand, you want to spot dirt, because that's the only way to justify what you're doing. Why am I cleaning this, there's nothing to clean here, what a waste of time. But once you switch to cleaning mode, it doesn't take long before you find dirt, no matter how clean the thing is. So you start cleaning, and once you exhaust the supply of dirt, you move on to another area.

Now comes phase two. Your eyes have been focused on finding dirt for so long that you start noticing that in this new area there are spots of fine dirt that you didn't notice before. You think to yourself huh, that's weird, I didn't see this in the first area I was cleaning. So you go back, and suddenly, there it is. You got the big, obvious specs of dirt, but you missed these smaller ones. Now you have to make a decision. Do I ignore this, and hope that noone else will notice it either, and I'll be in the clear? Or do I do a thorough job and clean as much as I can?

Let's say you choose the latter option. So you're cleaning and it's really getting boring, cause there is so much more fine dirt than there is obvious, big dirt. Emotionally, there is no satisfaction from cleaning, because the more you clean the more details your eyes find that you didn't see before. Once you get rid of the really fine dirt and move on, you invariable notice you missed something over here. And over there. And everywhere.

In theory, the process of cleaning proceeds until there's no more dirt visible. But you'll never get there, because there's always more dirt, smaller dirt, or dirt that won't come off easily. You could clean your bathroom until it's completely pristine, and spend the whole weekend doing that, but would that really make you happy? In a week there will be dirt again, and in a month the dirt will be visible on a regular basis. All this time and effort you spent one weekend, and for what?

The truth, of course, is that it's impossible to get anything completely clean. You would have to actually remove all the molecules that don't belong.

So at some point you reach your limit. That's enough, I'm sick of cleaning. You stop cleaning, you sit back and relax for a minute. You're not feeling happy, because you know there is still more dirt over there. But how long can you go on cleaning? Alright, forget it. Your mind drifts off to something else you'd rather be thinking about. Cleaning starts to fade in your mind. Fifteen minutes later your mind is completely occupied with something else.

Now something interesting happens. Someone goes into the bathroom. Wow, it is really clean in here! Woh, what? You go in yourself. Hey, look at that, I don't remember the last time it was this clean. Interestingly, the pay off comes not from cleaning "until it's clean", but from giving up on it. You switch from cleaning mode and stop using your cleaning eye. Now the image before you is contrasted with the way you remember the bathroom, and you see the difference. Hey, it looks clean.

So it turns out that authors have "book tours" (yeah, it sounds crazy, doesn't it?). You would think that everything they had to say was already in the book, but they do this to sell more books. They go around to various cities and they talk about their book and sometimes participate in panel discussions with other authors.

An integral part of this is the book signing. Now suppose you read a book that was very good and you really appreciate the ideas of this person and their ability to express them in such a way that they have. What benefit do you possibly see in having it signed by the author? First of all, their name is already on the book (the cover, in fact), so it's redundant. So what do you benefit from knowing that this person wrote their name on this paper? What difference does it make?

It's stupid celebrity worship every day of the week. I can sort of understand more how people ask sportsmen for autographs, because when you meet an athlete then you don't really have anything "of theirs" to keep. So even an autograph (which again is meaningless, who cares about the calligraphic skills of a sportsman? that's not what you admire them for) is something. With an author this is turned on its head, because the item being signed is the very work that you appreciate, so you already _have_ their best output in your hand.