new things 2012-05-07 / 10:02 pm I went to CERN, and one of the many great things about it is that people are doing things there in order to understand what they are doing, and it’s this vast iterative process with no definite outcome, but we do it because, perhaps, this is what we do when we encounter new things; we cannot do otherwise. We must stare at them ever longer and harder to understand what they mean. #sxaesthetic / 10:01 pm Some architects can look at a building and tell you which version of autodesk was used to create it. The last glass 2011-12-13 / 11:06 pm C.P. To the limit? G.D. What is the limit? It’s complicated.. I’ll tell you another way: an alcoholic is someone who never stops drinking. It never stops being the last drink. What does that mean? It’s as beautiful as…the formula of Peguy: The last water lily does not repeat the first… it’s the first water lily who copies all the others and the last. The first glass… repeats the last. The last is what matters. So what’s the last drink for an alcoholic? Well he gets up in the morning -I suppose he takes alcohol in the morning… and there are all types who take alcohol in the morning- and it’s all about waiting for the moment when he reaches the last glass. It’s neither the first, second or third that interests.. There’s something clever and cunning in an alcoholic, and the last glass also means… he evaluates, there is an evaluation, he assesses what can withstand… without collapsing. That varies widely depending on the individual. He evaluates the last drink and the others are his way of keeping the last one waiting. ‘The last’ means what? It means there can’t be more drink this day. It’s the last one that would allow.. allow him to start again the next day. Because if.. if he reaches the last, on the contrary, it exceeds his power. The last puts him under its power. To be under its power, when the last drink exceeds his power, he collapses. It means he’s in the hospital, or a change of habit; it means a change of arrangements. So when he says ‘the last glass’.. it is not the last, but the penultimate. He goes in search of the penultimate. Put in other terms, the penultimate [avant-derrier] is, I believe, the ‘penultimate’? All the Names 2011-11-24 / 1:30 pm Saramago’s own novel of 1997, Todos os Nomes (All the Names), set in the central registry office of an unnamed country, confronts the reader with an intimidating vista of endless shelves, “ciclópicas e sobre-humanas” (“cyclopean and superhuman”), which resembles Borges’ library, except that this labyrinth contains, not books or knowledge, but dry-as-dust bureaucratic files. sola lingua bona est lingua mortua 2011-11-14 / 9:30 am the only good language is a dead language spiritus ubi vult spirat / 9:29 am the spirit spreads wherever it wants Feynman Method 2011-11-10 / 8:56 pm Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” WEIRD 2011-10-22 / 2:22 pm Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Contre-jour 2011-08-15 / 3:32 pm Contre-jour, French for ‘against daylight’, refers to photographs taken when the camera is pointing directly toward a source of light. tf–idf / 3:12 pm The tf–idf weight term frequency–inverse document frequency is a weight often used in information retrieval and text mining. This weight is a statistical measure used to evaluate how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. The importance increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document but is offset by the frequency of the word in the corpus. Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a documents relevance given a user query. Tf-idf can be successfully used for stop-words filtering in various subject fields including text summarization and classification. Lisp 2011-08-05 / 12:01 am We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses. Gerund 2011-07-31 / 9:42 pm In linguistics, gerund is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages: As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb (in its -ing form) as a noun (for example, the verb “learning” in the sentence “Learning is an easy process for some”). The word ‘gerund’ in English comes from the Latin term gerundium, of the same meaning. Gerundium itself comes from the gerundive of the Latin verb gero, gerundus, meaning “to be carried out”. Impression, Sunrise 2011-07-23 / 3:36 pm Although it seems that the sun is the brightest spot on the canvas, it is in fact, when measured with a photometer, the same brightness or luminance as the sky. Dr. Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, said “If you make a black and white copy of Impression: Sunrise, the Sun disappears [almost] entirely.” Isotropy 2011-07-06 / 7:06 pm Isotropy is uniformity in all orientations; it is derived from the Greek iso (equal) and tropos (direction). Precise definitions depend on the subject area. Exceptions, or inequalities, are frequently indicated by the prefix an, hence anisotropy. Anisotropy is also used to describe situations where properties vary systematically, dependent on direction. Isotropic radiation has the same intensity regardless of the direction of measurement, and an isotropic field exerts the same action regardless of how the test particle is oriented. Isotropic materials / 7:05 pm An isotropic material is one which looks the same in every direction. We cannot define any special direction using the material properties. In other words, none of the properties depend the orientation; it is perfectly rotationally symmetric. Note that in order to be isotropic the material must be homogenous on the length scale of interest, ie the same at every point in the material. For instance, rubber is a very isotropic material. Take a rubber ball, and it will feel the same and bounce the same however you rotate it. On the other hand, wood is an anisotropic material: hit it with an axe and it will take more force to break of you are cutting across the grain than along it. (Remember we’re thinking about the material rather than the shape of the object.) Can you show it to me? 2011-06-05 / 9:33 pm In the course of my life, the more I concerned myself with physics, I realized that actually I was a “meta-physicist”. And then I increasingly played with that idea. And if you ask me: “My dear Heinz von Foerster, what is a meta-physicist?’, I would say the following: There are questions among those we ask about the world that it is possible to answer: “Heinz von Foerster, how old are you?” Well, you can look that up in a catalog: Born in 1911, that means he is 90. Or you can ask questions which cannot be answered, like for example: “Heinz von Foerster, tell me, what was the origin of the universe?” Well, then I could give you one of the 35 different theories. Ask an astronomer, and he says: “There was this Big Bang about 20 million years ago.” Or ask a good Catholic: “Everyone knows that. God created the world, and after seven days he was weary and took a break and that was Sunday …” So there are different, very interesting hypotheses about the origins of the universe. That is, there are so many different hypotheses because the question cannot be answered. So all that is relevant is how interesting is the story that someone invents to explain the origins of the universe. _Of course we are very close to art there … If it’s a matter of inventing a good story, a poetic story …_ Exactly, exactly … That’s what it is. There is a struggle between two or three or even ten different poets. Who can invent a funny, amusing or interesting story so that everyone immediately thinks: “That’s what must have happened!” _But science, and your own research … those are not just inventions or good stories? Surely they’re based on mathematics, on numbers, on provability, on indisputable scientific data?_ Well, yes, but these days there is already so much data that it is no longer possible to include all the different data in your “story”. And then artificial data is invented, for example “particles” … Then “particles” are invented that do whatever it is we don’t understand. So in my opinion particles are always the solutions to problems that we can’t solve any other way. That is, they are inventions that help to explain certain problems. Those are particles. _I think I have to ask a dumb question…_ I understand, yes … Right, let me explain it a bit better. Let’s say there is a hole in my theory, one I can’t gloss over. So what I do is, I just say: Look, here are some new particles, that are either green, yellow or … I don’t know what … They replace the hole in my theory. So I maintain that each particle we read about in today’s physics is the answer to a question that we can’t answer. _But that’s terrible! How can we let a world-wide networked system of machines grow, more or less into infinity, if it is based on theories that apparently have holes or are only “good stories”, I mean on such shaky foundations? Isn’t that dangerous?_ Well, in this world-wide functioning system of machines all theories are correct. And of course that’s what people want. And why are they correct? Because they can all be deduced from other theories and “stories”. _But what will it lead to? How does it go on?_ It goes on deducing indefinitely. _But there have to be limits somewhere?_ No, not at all, that’s the good thing about it. You can go on forever. _In logic._ Yes, precisely. _But in reality?_ Where is reality? Can you show it to me? Starmaking 2011-04-25 / 1:00 am A chair I make is likely to wobble; a book takes endless pains; I can’t make a computer at all; and no one has been able to make a plane that flies far on batteries. Making right world – versions ‑ or making worlds ‑ is harder than making chairs or planes, and failure is common, largely because all we have available is scrap material recycled from old and stubborn worlds. Our having done no better or worse is no evidence that chairs or planes or worlds are found rather than made. N.Goodman – Ways of worldmaking 2011-04-11 / 11:19 pm As intimated by William James’s equivocal title A Pluralistic Universe, the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking. ¶ Why, then, does Cassirer stress the multiplicity of worlds? In what important and often neglected sense are there many worlds? Let it be clear that the question here is not of the possible worlds that many of my contemporaries, especially those near Disneyland, are busy making and manipulating. We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds. How to interpret such terms as “real”, “unreal”, “fictive”, and “possible” is a subsequent question. ¶ Consider, to begin with, the statements “The sun always moves” and “The sun never moves” which, though equally true, are at odds with each other. Shall we say, then, that they describe different worlds, and indeed that there are as many different worlds as there are such mutually exclusive truths? Rather, we are inclined to regard the two strings of words not as complete statements with truth-values of their own but as elliptical for some such statements as “Under frame of reference A, the sun always moves” and “Under frame of reference B, the sun never moves” — statements that may both be true of the same world. ¶ Frames of reference, though, seem to belong less to what is described than to systems of description: and each of the two statements relates what is described to such a system. If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. ¶ The alternative descriptions of motion, all of them in much the same terms and routinely transformable into one another, provide only a minor and rather pallid example of diversity in accounts of the world. Much more striking is the vast variety of versions and visions in the several sciences, in the works of different painters and writers, and in our perceptions as informed by these, by circumstances, and by our own insights, interests’ and past experiences. Even with all illusory or wrong or dubious versions dropped, the rest exhibit new dimensions of disparity. Here we have no neat set of frames of reference, no ready rules for transforming physics, biology, and psychology into one another, and no way at all of transforming any of these into Van Gogh’s vision, or Van Gogh’s into Canaletto’s. Such of these versions as are depictions rather than descriptions have no truth-value in the literal sense, and cannot be combined by conjunction. The difference between juxtaposing and conjoining two statements has no evident analogue for two pictures or for a picture and a statement. The dramatically contrasting versions of the world can of course be relativized: each is right under a given system — for a given science, a given artist, or a given perceiver and situation. Here again we turn from describing or depicting ‘the world’ to talking of descriptions and depictions, but now without even the consolation of intertranslatability among or any evident organization of the several systems in question. Circle Takes the Square 2011-04-08 / 11:47 am I know its all been done before, I want to do it again. I want do it again. Thinking and Thought 2011-04-05 / 8:47 pm Further, in our language we have a distinction between “thinking” and “thought.” “Thinking” implies the present tense—some activity going on which may include critical sensitivity to what can go wrong. Also there may be new ideas, and perhaps occasionally perception of some kind inside. “Thought” is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something it just evaporates. but thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—a trace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically. So thought is the response from memory—from the past, from what has been done. Thus we have thinking and thought. Formal/Fundamental 2011-03-30 / 1:52 pm ART IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ORNAMENT OF SOCIETY AS IT IS NOW, AND NOT THE WARNING SIGNAL FOR SOCIETY AS IT SHOULD BE—NEVER THAT. HOW CAN THE ARTIST CONTEST SOCIETY WHEN HIS ART, ALL ART, “BELONGS” OBJECTIVELY TO THAT SOCIETY? HE BELIEVES, ALAS, IN THE MYTH OF REVOLUTIONARY ART. BUT ART IS OBJECTIVELY REACTIONARY. Foreign Agents 2011-03-20 / 12:22 am The books were small, black, and thin; footnotes or other academic commentary were conspicuously absent. They could be read on the subway, a few pages at a time, like the newspaper: Their place was in the pockets of spiked leather jackets as much as on the shelves. Indeed, critics would often go out of their way to avoid quoting from them, returning to the original French texts or to more authoritative sources, as if there were something truly wrong with the volumes. They had a sleek, covert look and feel that happened to mesh with that moment of New York City perfectly, seeming to reflect the New World Order’s aesthetic: hard and portable, compact and cost-effective. They were light, but moving at light-speed, never giving the sense that one had time to slow down and scratch one’s head-they were already headed somewhere else. Who Needs Guitars Anyway? 2011-03-09 / 9:17 pm is an album released in 2000 by Alice DeeJay. It is their first and only album. Includes the hit singles “Back In My Life”, “Better Off Alone”, “Will I Ever”, “The Lonely One”, and “Celebrate Our Love” (listed in chronological order, and descending order of popularity). Leather and Lace 2011-03-08 / 11:33 am Another long-forgotten gesture, the Société Anonyme’s inaugural exhibition seems to have been in effect Duchamp’s first major exhibition design, looking forward to his later Surrealist installations, and for it he covered the floor of the entire space with industrial rubber, wrapped the walls with a special oilskin fabric that would reflect the blue of the sky, and encircled all of the individual paintings with lace doily frames. No photographs of this exhibition, sadly, survive. Ratio 2011-02-22 / 11:12 pm More generally, all our concepts and explanations (whether of universal and necessary character or not) have at their core the perception of a totality of ratios or proportions. [...] Thus, to perceive such a simple thing as the straightness of a line is to see that each segment of it is related to the next segment, as the next is in turn related to the one that follows it. Or, in more concise terms, if S1, S2, S3, denote any three successive segments, then S1 : S2 :: S2 : S3. If, however, the line should suddenly change its direction, at a certain point, then we would see that the segment that precedes this point is not related to the one that follows in the same way as prevails among the rest of the segments. If we could introduce the symbol X to mean “is not to” then, for this case, we could write S2 X S2 :: S2 : S3 (i.e., S1 is not to S2, as S2 is to S3). ¶ When we are perceiving one line meeting another, we are immediately aware of a totality of such similarities and differences of ratio. And, of course, as our attention goes to more complex structures of lines and surfaces forming a geometrical figure, we begin to be aware of a whole hierarchy of such ratios and their relationships. This hierarchy can develop indefinitely in its complexity and subtlety, as our perception extends into every phase of life. No matter what we perceive, however the essential meaning or content of this perception involves a totality of ratio, in the most general sense of this word. Arbitrage / 11:02 pm “Arbitrage,” in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. [...] Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free. What spatial and temporal arbitrage have in common is that both hinge on the arbitrageur’s being extremely well informed: one about price gradients across space at a given time, and the other about price gradients over time in a given place. Flee all milieus. 2011-02-17 / 9:21 pm Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is oriented toward the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing; anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action; scientific milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today; sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. Writing 2010-12-18 / 2:44 pm Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land-surveying and map-making, even of countries yet to come. Points 2010-12-13 / 4:04 pm var J0000 = 1721424.5; // Julian date of Gregorian epoch: 0000-01-01 || var J1970 = 2440587.5; // Julian date at Unix epoch: 1970-01-01 || var JMJD = 2400000.5; // Epoch of Modified Julian Date system || var J1900 = 2415020.5; // Epoch (day 1) of Excel 1900 date system (PC) || var J1904 = 2416480.5; // Epoch (day 0) of Excel 1904 date system (Mac) Embodiment 2010-09-14 / 12:08 am One contemporary belief likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction. Coincident with cybernetic developments that stripped information of its body were discursive analyses within the humanities, especially the archaeology of knowledge pioneered by Michel Foucault, that saw the body as a play of discourse systems. Although researchers in the physical and human sciences acknowledged the importance of materiality in different ways, they nevertheless collaborated in creating the postmodern ideology that the body’s materiality is secondary to the logical or semiotic structures it encodes. It is not difficult to find pronouncements supporting an ideology of disembodiment in cultural theory, no less than in cybernetics. Consider the following claims. “The Human body, our body, seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the complexity and multiplicity of its organs, of its tissue and functions, because today everything is concentrated in the brain and the genetic code, which alone sum up the operational definition of being,” Jean Baudriallard wrote in The Ecstasy of Communication. I believe that they should be taken as evidence not that the body has disappeared by that a certain kind of subjectivity has emerged. The very theorists who most emphatically claim that the body is disappearing also operate within material and cultural circumstances that make the claim for the body’s disappearance seem plausible. The body’s dematerialization depends in complex and highly specific ways on the embodied circumstances that an ideology of dematerialization would obscure. Excavating these connections requires a way of talking about the body responsive to its construction as discourse/information and yet not trapped within it. Richard Kenney / 12:04 am Cringe ye, who yet jot “Volkswagon” when the doctor prompts “automata.” The world’s changed; no angels at the top end, now—and you? Syzygy 2010-08-23 / 9:46 pm In broadest terms, syzygy (pronounced /ˈsɪzɨdʒi/) is a kind of unity, especially through coordination or alignment, most commonly used in the astronomical and/or astrological sense. Syzygy is derived from the Late Latin syzygia, “conjunction,” from the Greek σύζυγος (syzygos). Syzygial, adjective of syzygy, describes the alignment of three or more celestial bodies in the same gravitational system along a line. Provisional / 9:42 pm It is, of course, well known that in all normal acts of visual perception the eyes do not observe the world with a blank, unmoving stare. On the contrary, they observe by continually scanning the visual field in a series of movements to and fro, and making continuous adjustments of focus. Without this optical movement, and the muscular sensations which accompany it, we should have no proper appreciation of space. And where drawing is concerned it seems quite clear that the movements suggested by the traces of the drawing-point ought actually to guide the motions of the eyes. The eyes must follow the original movements of the point—all of them, in due scale of emphasis—if one is to grasp the drawing properly. One adopts the mental scanning-pattern which the artist originally set down. One learns thus, by assimilation, advanced scanning procedures from artists whose own highly developed performances have been recorded by their drawing-points. So drawing is seen to be one of the most important elements in educated the eye and in developing visual perception—itself a matter of visual concepts and habitual structures. [...] This again is one of the reasons why it matters so much for us to be able to discern in a drawing the original rough laying-out strokes by which the artist first located his image on the surface. They are an integral part of the scanning-pattern which will give to our perception the totality of the image. [...] In fact it is well known that excessive ‘completeness’ or ‘finish’ can be more injurious to a drawing than to any other kind of art. William Thomson (1852) / 9:05 pm The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws. But it is impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and hence into heat, than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever. Northern gesture 2010-07-12 / 10:49 pm Seasoned explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen, set down mountains and islands on their charts where there was nothing but empty sky … Expeditions sent out later to verify these new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further confusing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys, thereby observing a constant receding of the image, did they prove that the land was not there at all. Lappland / 10:44 pm …Vitolf deprived those he wished of his sense of sight …Visinn, too, a fighter of extraordinary reputation had the habit of reducing the edge of all weapons to a state of bluntness merely by his glance. Empty space 2010-06-30 / 10:31 am Why not have beings for every kind of direction? Why are we three-dimensional beings unaware of any two-dimensional beings? How could beings of four dimensions escape detection as regards their three dimensions; and how could a being of one dimension, a fourth dimension, interfere with beings of dimensions to which it does not belong? The three-dimensional doctrine of space must be regarded with suspicion; for such a division merely selects certain few factors which are not what they appear to be. […] We may turn now to more general considerations. We look upon a piece of land, and we remark that there is _space_ to build twenty houses on; so, too, we glance into our purse, and say that it is _empty_. Now note, not only is vision three-dimensionsal, but it’s field is unbroken by any points of no vision. Hence we never see nothing, never really gaze into vacancy. What do we mean, then, by an _empty_ purse? There is but one answer. Certain lines are observed, where certain other lines or complexes are imaginable. Instead of the worn lining, sovereigns might be seen; instead of heaps of refuse, houses might be seen. It is not that a full purse is an empty purse plus coins, it is a purse the lining of which is made of gold and not leather. […] What, then, is meant by _space_ and _empty space_? Are they a mysterious somewhere where lines are placed, a hole without walls where things are situated? One fails to catch the sense of these phrases, except in terms of lines. If the nearest row of houses which is within the view were pulled down, I could see the exterior of the next row behind it. So, too, the exterior of the row to be pulled down could be made to vanish, by building in front of it, by changing the lines. Similarly, since only one line in one position can be seen on a smooth two-dimensional plane, two things cannot simultaneously occupy the same space. Again, most lines may be displaced by others, and hence men speak of latent lines, of space. Infinite space, except as meaning infinite expanse, or infinite endeavour to see, is infinite nonsense: you might as well say you could imagine a room without boundaries. If we could stand on an overhanging promontory of a flat world and look outwards, we should have the immediate environment of the eyes, and around us, perhaps, some grey expanse. This expanse might be imagined indefinitely retreating as we advance into the gloom; but wipe out the lines, wipe out sight, and not space but nothing is left. Assume that we are beings but of one sense, that of vision, and there can be little doubt that by space we mean certain line relations and details, and that apart from these relations the word has no meaning. Thus space, being a relation between systems, cannot exist prior to systems, nor can it survive them. Large, small, round, square , are visual terms. When we are once convinced that space is not a glove into which the world fits, our difficulties are soon overcome. How things appear 2010-05-22 / 3:18 pm Actually, it’s worse than that. As these quotations attest, Western philosophy is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, or basis and superstructure, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial. So where does colour lie along this well-worn path? Well, if colour is make-up, then it is not really on this path at all, and perhaps this is a part of the colour problem. If surface veils depth, if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface, and thus even farther from substance than ‘true’ appearance. How things appear is one thing; how things appear to appear is another. Colour is a double illusion, a double deception. It is not just that colour is at the wrong end of a moral opposition; it is perhaps, just beyond the wrong end. Colour/Colours / 1:35 am Colour may be a continuum, but the continuum is continuously broken, the indivisible endlessly divided. Colour is formless but ever formed into patterns and shapes. From at least the time of Newton, colour has been subjected to the discipline of geometry, ordered into an endless variety of colour circles, triangles, stars, cubes, cylinders or spheres. These shapes always contain divisions, and these divisions, as often as not, contain words. And with these words, colour becomes colours. Materiality / 12:50 am In a way, Smithson saw and treated the world as an enormous text, reminiscent of the library in Borges’s “Library of Babel,” which is synonymous with the universe itself, “composed of an indefinite and perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries”–which seem to prefigure the crystalline structures that Smithson himself favored. Borges’s library, moreover, is defined as “a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Significantly, in a 1968 citation of Pascal’s statement, Smithson added “or language becomes an infinite museum whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere.” Indeed, Smithson treated written texts as if they too–like his plastic works–were made of solid materials; as if words were not only abstract signs for things and concepts, but also a form of matter. Asked in 1972 whether his writing affected the development of the things he made, Smithson answered that “language tended to inform my structures. In other words, I guess if there was any kind of notation it was a kind of linguistic notation … But I was interested in language as a material entity, as something that wasn’t involved in ideational values.” This materiality, he felt, distinguished his work from conceptual art, which he characterized as “essentially ideational.” When asked what he meant by the “material” quality of language, Smithson elaborated: “Well, just as printed matter–information which has a kind of physical presence for me. I would construct my articles the way I would construct a work.” [...] Moreover, Smithson saw words themselves as containing a crucial (if usually overlooked) physicality which, through a slight shift in perceptual emphasis, could be seen to contain its own network of meanings: “Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.” This kind of byplay between thing and idea lies at the core of Smithson’s whole undertaking as a writer and as an artist. “My work is impure,” he asserted in 1969, “it is clogged with matter. There is no escape from the mind. The two are in a constant collision course. You might say that my work is like an artistic disaster. It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.” Giuseppe Penone 2010-05-13 / 10:05 pm The mirrored lenses is a work done in 1970. We created them with an optician. At the time contact lenses were not as common as today, they were not used as much. It was created putting two lenses together with a mirrored surface between the two lenses. They were very thick and difficult to wear, quite painful. The idea was that the body in itself, in space is sculpture. The body of a person. When our eyes are open the physical extension is as far as the eyes can see. The space we see is reflected in our mind, therefore the space we see is the extension of our body. Closing our eyes we define the body with the volume that it really has. And what we see we transmit it through our actions, in what we do, in the conception of reality and life that we have, and if you make a visual work you would retransmit it through the work. Therefore closing our eyes with a mirrored element, reflecting what we see, it allows others to see what this person would have seen. And that was the idea. It is like becoming part of the work before it is created. [...] Well I said before, when someone looks, the external space is what we have in our mind. And is there a time as well when you open your eyes, the light time, like a propagation of the glance. Like a projection. In this piece I used branches and I have created a mask with leaves covering the eyes, and from there two branches are like the propagation of the glance in space. These two branches cross over indicating what we have seen, like the optic nerves, that is why the title of this work is ‘Doppio sguardo vegetale’ as there are two masks crossing glances, and the reason of the leaves is to indicate that. [...] In 1978 I wanted to create a sculpture about the idea of breath, that is how ‘soffio di fogile’ has been created, because when we breathe we create a volume of air different from that which surrounds us, and this volume of air, it is already a sculpture, something automatic that we produce for all our life, this volume that extends from our body. [...] The synthesis of the shape of a breath is like a vase, therefore I underlined it with the shape of a vase and the imprint of a body that produces breath. It is like relating the body with the invisible part of its extension. Another point is that when we breathe we absorb oxygen into our body through the lungs, and our body which is waterproof to the outside in that moment changes. This is what happened as well during reproduction, in that case the woman’s body is reactive to the man’s semen, there is something concerning Genesis in the idea of breath which is expressed in mythology and with the religious conception of the creation of mankind. There is this idea of breath as a vital part of generating life. This is secondary though to the problem I had with sculpture. Later on I realised this other work collecting box leaves. As they are small and light. I put them together and I lied on them and breathed in, again to highlight the body and the extension of breath which is clear in the leaves; so the weight of the body and the breath have the same value. Robert Irwin on Mondrian 2010-05-04 / 12:13 am Mondrian laid out the conceptual ground for contemporary art — the history of Mondrian’s work lays out a very careful road map — he takes his work from one kind of perception or awareness of reality (a beautifully rendered tree or flower) and then step-by-step began to examine other dimensions of how it exists (its field density, its weight, the interaction of the energy of it to its space). Mondrian moved from one kind of perception of knowing to another kind of perception of knowing (i.e., from one kind of perception or knowing or understanding of reality to another kind of understanding or perception of reality). [...] Having brought up Piet Mondrian, let me just read something from him, written in 1912, which kind of grounds everything I do today. Interesting to find it 30 years later… I could have saved myself a lot of time [...] Desiderata of Interplanetary Internetworking 2010-04-29 / 10:38 pm Go thoughtfully in the knowledge that all interplanetary communication derives from the modulation of radiated energy, and sometimes a planet will be between the source and the destination. Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way. Neither rely on ample bandwidth, for power is scarce out there and the bit error rates are high. Know too that signal strength drops off by the square of the distance, and there is a lot of distance. Consider the preciousness of interplanetary communication links, and restrict access to them with all your heart. Protect also the confidentiality of application data or risk losing your customers. Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible. Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you. Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops — neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it. Seventh Elegy 2010-04-17 / 12:34 pm Where once an enduring house was, now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power, formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth. Temples are no longer known. User-Generated Content / 12:26 pm Not content in the sense of meaning or subject matter, but rather information as distinct from its mode of presentation. Prelinger Archives / 12:24 pm As we wish to address the future the past also desires to address us. It’s a brassiere. 2010-03-03 / 11:24 pm It’s brand-new. Revolutionary uplift. Smallest Uninteresting Number 2009-12-25 / 12:10 am The question arises: Are there any uninteresting numbers? We can prove that there are none by the following simple steps. If there are dull numbers, then we can divide all numbers into two sets – interesting and dull. In the set of dull numbers there will be only one number that is the smallest. Since it is the smallest uninteresting number it becomes, ipso facto , an interesting number. We must therefore remove it from the dull set and place it in the other. But now there will be another smallest uninteresting number. Repeating this process will make any dull number interesting. Liar / 12:08 am (1) THIS SENTENCE CONTAINS FIVE WORDS (2) THIS SENTENCE CONTAINS EIGHT WORDS (3) EXACTLY ONE SENTENCE ON THIS CARD IS TRUE YOUR FREEDOM AND YOUR FLATNESS / 12:03 am YOUR FREEDOM AND YOUR FLATNESS Pseudomenon / 12:03 am The liar paradox, known to the ancients as the pseudomenon, encompasses paradoxical statements such as “This sentence is false.” or “The next sentence is false. The previous sentence is true.” These statements are paradoxical because there is no way to assign them a consistent classical binary truth value. If “This sentence is false” is true, then it is true and what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it is false. On the other hand, if it is false, then what it says is not the case; thus, since it says that it is false, it must be true. Potential / 12:01 am Possibility has, in effect, materialized. The matter of the system has entered a state where it does not extrapolate into an abstract possibility, and instead effectively absorbs possibilities, en masse, into its animated matter. Materially present possibility is potential. The system”s criticality, of course, is as actual as any other state. What is in excess-over is the self-referentiality of the system”s critical condition, its doubling back on itself en masse. What the self-absorbed system infolds is materially co-present in that way: in potential. Assemblage 2009-12-24 / 11:58 pm By materializing self-relation, its representationally paradoxical properties are neutralized. The logical contradiction of the Liar Paradox resolves itself into the engineering circuit of the bistable multivibrator: ‘This statement is false’ is true when it is false and vice versa; but a logical NOT gate whose input is connected to its own output materializes the unthinkable by traversing a sequence of states in time: TRUE, FALSE, TRUE etc. Sets 2009-12-12 / 1:57 pm A pack of wolves, a bunch of grapes, or a flock of pigeons are all examples of sets of things. Alice DeeJay 2009-11-29 / 2:15 pm Who Needs Guitars Anyway? Drawn in Two Directions 2009-09-14 / 10:01 pm Every imaginable line exemplifies every direction at once. A perpendicular line without breadth or depth is a monstrosity, and cannot be conceived. Infrathin 2009-09-01 / 12:31 am Duchamp’s term for the all but imperceptible difference between two seemingly identical items was, the term infrathin [inframince], a term closely linked to what Duchamp also called deferral or delay. … Indeed, infrathin, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, ‘One can only give examples of it.’ Aesthetic (2) 2009-07-10 / 12:24 am 1798 W. TAYLOR in Monthly Rev. XXV. 585 In the dialect peculiar to Professor Kant..his receptivity for aesthetic gratification [is] not delicate. [mod. ad. Gr., of or pertaining to, things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial), also ‘perceptive, sharp in the senses’; f. vb. stem - ‘feel, apprehend by the senses’. Applied in Germ. by Baumgarten (1750-58, Æsthetica) to ‘criticism of taste’ considered as a science or philosophy; against which, as a misuse of the word found in German only, protest was made by Kant (1781, Crit. R.V. 21), who applied the name, in accordance with the ancient distinction of and, to ‘the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception,’ a sense retained in the Kantian philosophy, and found in English c1800. But Baumgarten's use of æsthetik found popular acceptance, and appeared in Eng. after 1830, though its adoption was long opposed. (See below.) Recent extravagances in the adoption of a sentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty have still further removed æsthetic and its derivatives from their etymological and purely philosophical meaning. ‘The pronunciations ({ope}s{sm}{vdftheta}{ope}t{shti}k, i{lm}s{sm}{vdftheta}{ope}t{shti}k, {ope}s{sm}{vdftheta}i{lm}t{shti}k, i{lm}s{sm}{vdftheta}i{lm}t{shti}k), are all in use; the second is at present most common in London’ (N.E.D., 1884).] Aesthetic 2009-07-09 / 11:04 am Like ‘modernism’, the term ‘aesthetic’ is continuously debased, its original reference to something approaching ‘the emotional sensation of reaction to the visual’ — or ‘having an experience’ — now diluted to little more than a euphemism for ‘formal’. Here I’ve tried to go after those objects I imagine will combine or curdle to provoke something aesthetic in that original sense. In Objects 2009-06-24 / 11:47 pm Difference is the contrary of equality Movement / Brian Massumi 2009-04-29 / 11:11 pm It is the movement of our bodies that operates the selection. Every move we make is an existential pressure cooker bringing forth vision from the vacuum. It has long been known that vision cannot develop if the body is immobilized. This was tested in the famous (and infamous) experiments in which kittens were immobilized to find out whether they would be able to see when the grew up. They couldn’t. North 2009-04-17 / 11:45 am The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD). “Perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these were most convenient for study if they were in the upper right-hand corner,” historian Daniel Boorstin opines. Mapmakers haven’t always followed Ptolemy; during the Middle Ages, Boorstin notes, maps often had east on top–whence the expression “to orient.” Proposition 3 2009-04-10 / 11:07 pm 4) Finally, the model is problematic, instead of theorematic: figures are considered only from the point of view of the affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not proceed by specific differences from a genus to its species, nor by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all manner of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem is of the rational order (de I’ordre des raisons), the problem is affective, and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations and creations within science itself. Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an “obstacle,” it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection, in other words a war machine. All that movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the “problem-element” and subordinates it to the “theorem-element.” Standard Stoppages 2008-12-25 / 10:54 pm JJJJJ YR-MO-DA HH:MM:SS TT L H msADV UTC(NIST) OTM Watching the Gaps 2008-12-21 / 7:43 pm Watching the Gaps Sculpture and Psychoanalysis – Judd’s Badge – Tim Martin - 2008-12-01 / 8:48 pm To give a very simple example, it is like the three-year-old boy who, upon losing his favourite toy car, responds to the anxiety by becoming the car and motoring around as if he were the car.  The id's object-cathexis is thus taken under control by the ego by making itself into a car, or at least those parts of the car that are libido causing, i.e. the sound, the movement, the shiny paint, the variety of interior spaces, and the translucency of the glass.  This is why Smithson listed in detail the chemical contents of the paints he and Judd used in 1966.  Thus, for Smithson, specific objects produced a sensation of 'an inaccessible regression [that] enforces a danger-stimulus, to which no reaction is appropriate'.  Although the object-choice itself regresses to infinity (it's gone), no anxiety results because, as models of the ego, Judd's sculptures retain some of its features. Fragmentation and Interdisciplinarity 2008-10-13 / 5:35 pm “Thus art, science, technology, and human work in general, are divided up into specialties, each considered to be separate in essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs, men have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended to unite these specialties, but these new subjects have ultimately served mainly to add further separate fragments. [...] The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.” Bohm – Wholeness and the Implicate Order; pp. 1-3. Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, 183; 2008-06-18 / 6:43 am Fieldwork with children and computers is rich in examples of the kind of fright that Minsky expects. For example, an incident where it was evoked by a first contact with recursion is reported in Sherry Turkle, The Second Self. Interviews with adults on early experiences also reveal many such memories–fear of prisms, of mirrors reflecting mirrors, fear of questions such as “How far away are the stars?” Preposition 2008-03-05 / 7:21 am A word or phrase placed typically before a substantive and indicating the relation of that substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, as English at, by, with, from, and in regard to. Border transfer – edge transfer 2008-02-20 / 1:27 am Border transfer – edge transfer One thing after the other. 2007-10-25 / 1:30 pm One thing after the other. Cargo/Frontier 2007-09-14 / 7:01 pm Cargo/Frontier Default time/clock collection 2007-07-08 / 7:17 pm Default time/clock collection Demarcating Boundaries 2007-05-04 / 4:10 am There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers Hyper-solid homage to the artifical (Artfice); 2007-04-30 / 12:23 am “I am reminded of Roland Barthe’s essay on seventeenth-century Flemish painting, on obsessive tactile materialism, what he calls ‘the world as object in itself’.” Simulacrum; 2007-04-05 / 3:49 am The simulacrum on the far side of the screen towers of the everyday, not as its representation, but as its mythic model and truer self. Crash; / 3:49 am The crash would appear as the emblem of an unarticulated desire to return to a “primitive” regime of “symbolic exchange,” to a relation of fluidity and ambivalence, between the domains of the living and the dead, and incompatible with operation criteria. Language; / 1:02 am The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a good language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., “a,” “the,” “I”) should be shorter than less common words (e.g., “benefit,” “generation,” “mediocre”), so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise—e.g., a passing car—the listener should still be able to glean the meaning of the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory. Spatiotemporal Effects / Curtis Roads; 2007-03-14 / 6:53 pm The IR of a room contains many impulses, corresponding to reflections off various surfaces of the room–its echo pattern. When such an IR is convolved with an arbitrary sound, the result is as if that sound had been played in that room, because it has been mapped into the room’s echo pattern. Massumi on brightness; 2007-03-08 / 12:37 am Fogs: actual traces of the virtual are often light effects. Although we tend to think of the perceptual dimensions of light as clearly distinguishable and almost boringly familiar, they are not so docile on closer inspection. [...] The boundaries we set and distinctions we function by are habitual. According to many theorists of vision, they do not replace the infinitely complex perceptual fog that is our originary and abiding experience of light. They occur with them, alongside, in a parallel current or on a superposed abstract perceptual surface, in a perpetual state of emergence from the continuum of light-dimensions that one frustrated would-be tamer of visual anomaly termed “the brightness confound.” / The “brightness confound” can become a conscious percept, through a concerted effort of unlearning habits of seeing, or through a simple accident of attention. When it does, the confound is contagious. It strikes depth: three-dimensionality, argues the “ecological” school of perceptual theory, is an effect of complex differentials of surface lighting played out in ever-shifting proximities of shadow and color, reflectance and luminosity, illumination and translucence (it is not, as traditional theories of perception would have it, the product of mysterious calculations of relative size and distance–as if the eyes could count). / Depth is a surface effect susceptible to the brightness confound. When it goes, so goes separable form. Not only do the relative size and distance of objects flutter, their boundaries blur. They cease to be separate figures, becoming not entirely localizable zones in a fuzzy continuum. In other words, they cease to be objects, becoming what they always were, in the beginning and in parallel: fluctuations. Visual runs. Experiential transition zones. The distinctions of habit fold back into the always accompanying level of the more-than- three-dimensioned light concurrence from which they emerged. The fixed boundaries and “constants” of our habitual perceptions are emergences from an experiential confound to which they can return, and must return. For they are not in the final analysis structural constants at all, but continually regenerated effects, predicated on the variation they follow and emerge from, as its perceptual arrest. They rest entirely on variation. The Optical Unconscious; 2007-03-01 / 12:01 am The answer explains the reference to the “fixed stare” in that Ruskin cannot take his eyes from the “sea” and “the sea is a special kind of medium for modernism.” How so, the implied reader wants to know, and the answer is that the sea is “a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, the no-space of sensory deprivation.” So the sea is a sort of ready-made monochrome, or perhaps a natural analogue to an all over blue painting, or perhaps to the oblong luminosities of what Rosalind Krauss elsewhere designates “The California Sublime.” Or in any case for what she designates here as “the optical and its limits,” where a certain kind of positive nothingness is in fact what one sees. Present-tense 2007-01-30 / 4:47 am One could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a “slow” verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly so as to appear static. Boomerang / 4:38 am “As an example, let us consider the Latin verb ‘videre’, meaning ‘to see’, which is used in English in such forms as ‘video’. We then introduce the root verbal form ‘to vidate’. This does not mean merely to see in the visual sense, but we shall take it to refer to every aspect of perception including even the act of understanding, which is apprehension of a totality, that includes sense perception, intellect, feeling, etc. (e.g., in the common language ‘to understand’ and ‘to see’ may be used interchangeably). So the word ‘to vidate’ will call attention to a spontaneous and unrestricted act of perception of any sort whatsoever, including perception of whether what is seen fits or does not fit ‘what is’, as well as perception even of the very attention-calling function of the word itself (…)” David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram"; 2007-01-25 / 1:58 am “Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall – i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar – it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange….[by] paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for ‘real’ to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.” Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments; 2007-01-18 / 6:02 am There is something irresistible about such a place, something grand and empty. This kind of architecture without “value of qualities,” is, if anything, a fact. From this “undistinguished” run of architecture [...] we gain a clear perception of physical reality free from the general claims of “purity and idealism.” Only commodities can ford such illusionist values [...] As the cloying effect of such “values” wears off, one perceives the “facts” of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy. New Totalities; 2007-01-05 / 6:16 pm The new totalities, or transcultural ensembles, that can be envisioned in the near future in the place of “collective identities” issue from the processes of self-differentiation maturing into interferences. In this case differences strengthen our need for each other: Some of our differences are neutralized (in order not to become oppositional), others are intensified (in order to avoid group identification). Interference is what we perceive as the joy and play of communication that reinforces some of our differences and neutralizes others in the play of non-totalitarian totalities. Generally, totality can be developed in two directions: (1) as opposed to difference and therefore eliminating all particular differences, as in a totalitarian state; (2) as truly different from difference and therefore preserving and nourishing all particular differences, as in an interdisciplinary community. \ These new totalities will shape the transcultural world, which has not yet received any satisfactory theoretical articulation. Deconstruction may prove methodologically inadequate to this emerging class of totalities that could be detected as transcultural communities, or as transmetaphysical systems, as trans-utopian visions, or as transsocial groups. Deconstruction operates through the theoretical differentiation of existing unities while what is in question now is the new integration of differences, the construction of trans-differential cultural, social, epistemological totalities. Heat Death & Homogeneity (New Totalities) 2006-12-24 / 5:32 pm If the universe lasts for a sufficient time, it will asymptotically approach a state where all energy is evenly distributed. “That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” Collected and Edited 2006-11-24 / 6:46 pm [...] The three leitmotifs which the exhibition is exploring were introduced - 2006-11-23 / 3:09 pm Is modernity our antiquity? (“it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead.”), What is bare life? (“Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.”) and What is to be done? (“Today, education seems to offer one viable alternative to the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue sea (commodity fetishism)”). Yason Banal ‘Disaster But Disco’ / 3:05 pm Can you explain a little about the performance element of tonight? What the two half naked tattooed men are doing and your role in it? The performance tonight is quite important, at least to me personally, as I haven`t presented my body ‘live’ for quite some time. Usually what I show are traces of my performance via photography, video and sculpture, or if done ‘live’ employ other people/bodies instead. The two guys in the performance resemble sculptures; they are not actors. It continues my interest in masculine stupor and awkward figurines, as well as sleepwalking as an in-between state between reality and the subconscious, stillness and action. Visually, the black strip of electric tape on their eyes and headphones on their ears are very similar to the ‘straight’ guys you see appearing on amateur Japanese porn. I find this fascinating – the Japanese notion of outer and inner realities (I forgot what they’re called) – blocking out ‘disasters’ and other disturbances to norm, and living in a sort of fantasy ‘disco’ land. I think its also dangerous, because there is little acknowledgement or tolerance of certain deviations and ideas. On Anticipation: 2006-11-08 / 6:28 am In artificial intelligence, anticipation is the concept of an agent making decisions based on predictions, expectations, or beliefs about the future. It is widely considered that anticipation is a vital component of complex natural cognitive systems. As a branch of AI, anticipatory systems is a specialization still echoing the debates from the 1980s about the necessity for AI for an internal model. In 1985, Robert Rosen defined an anticipatory system as follows: A system containing a predictive model of itself and/or its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model’s predictions pertaining to a latter instant. The World’s First Successful Prediction of the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD) – Alleviate Social Loss Caused by Floods and Drought: 2006-11-06 / 3:06 am Frontier Research Center for Global Change (FRCGC) Climate Variations Research Program of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC; Yasuhiro Kato, President), after leading the way for the world to discover Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD *1) in 1999 which causes global abnormal weather, is working on to clarify its generating mechanism as well as performing model experiments using the Earth Simulator toward IOD prediction since 2005. Research Group (Hirofumi Sakuma, Group Leader; Swadhin K. Behera, Sub Leader; Jing-Jia Luo and Sebastien Masson, Research Scientist) led by Toshio Yamagata, program director, with the use of the advanced ocean-atmosphere coupled general circulation model called SINTEX-F1, which was developed under EU-Japan collaboration, succeeded to predict IOD event of 2006 fall from the November of 2005. Through reproduction experiments of past IOD events it is understood that the IOD events are usually predictable 4 months prior to an event. But predictions much earlier have become possible now after the world’s first successful prediction of the IOD by the Research Group. A part of this achievement is going to be published in the Journal of Climate of American Meteorological Society. We will continue to help in improving climate predictions by enhancing sparse observational network in the Indian Ocean and by making further improvements in the model and model initialization processes. Such a prediction system will alleviate natural disasters all over the world by sharing our advanced predictions through climate information network. Alternative DNS roots; 2006-10-29 / 9:39 pm DNS Server becomes an island when a domain controller points to itself for the _msdcs.ForestDnsName domain A clue to the multiplicity of directions: 2006-10-26 / 4:31 am Comment s’en sortir’, by the French philosopher Sarah Kofman: “Poros refers only to a sea-route or a route down a river, to a passage opened up across a chaotic expanse which it transforms into an ordered, qualified space by introducing differentiated routes, making visible the various directions of space, by giving directions to an expanse which was initially devoid of all contours, of all landmarks. “To say that a poros is a way to be found across an expanse of liquid is to stress that a poros is never traced in advance, that it can always be obliterated, that it must always be traced anew, in unprecedented fashion. One speaks of a poros when it is a matter of blazing a trail where no trail exists, of crossing an impassable expanse of territory, an unknown, hostile and boundless world, an apeiron which it is impossible to cross from end to end … the sea is the endless realm of pure movement, the most mobile, changeable and polymorphous of all spaces, a space where any way that has been traced is immediately obliterated, which transforms any journey into a voyage of exploration which is always unprecedented, dangerous and uncertain.” This to That, Figure to Ground; 2006-10-23 / 4:19 am The rectilinear grid is composed of points and consequently lines; a pragmatic means to partition space or standardize elements in space. Because of its numbered nature it too approaches infinity in all directions. It becomes a field; a distribution. This is a sudden shift from its pointed, lined nature to that of something more ambiguous; undifferentiated vastness. It presents problems for what could be called the figure, or object. The discrete is impossible when faced with a field. It might serve better to think of the discrete anomaly then as moments of increased “thisness” or “thatness.” Identity; 2006-10-11 / 12:22 am Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that “X is different from Y” assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are not logically or metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, “given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus.” That is: to say that two things are “the same” obscures the difference presupposed by there being two things in the first place. David Bohm on event/moment 2006-10-04 / 4:48 am “We begin by noting that current relativistic theories in physics describe the whole of reality in terms of a process whose ultimate element is a point event, i.e., something happening in a relatively small region of space and time. We propose instead that the basic element be a moment which, like the moment of consciousness, cannot be precisely related to measurements of space and time, but rather covers a somewhat vaguely defined region which is extended in space and has duration in time. The extent and duration of moment may vary from something very small to something very large, according to the context under discussion. As with consciousness, each moment has a certain explicate order, and in addition it enfolds all the others, through in its own way. So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.” After-image / 1:19 am After-image via r-echos / socialfiction 2006-08-27 / 5:06 pm Three notes about some aspects of this project (there is a lot more to imagine from it though!): / 1. it is presented as an echo of the immediate history of software and discourse about software (”A blogject is one of those things that has a certain kind of blogger thinking about.”), into the author’s own non-conventional ideas and references. grassroots AI and applied software criticism. / 2. where does a website start and end? how notions like “being inside” and “being outside” works on websites? There are obvious external limits to a website, a link to a different domain leads “outside” of a given website. A website can also be identified as a unique set of similar page thanks to a certain similarity of style, this gives a senses a being inside a website and going “outside” of it when you see pages with different templates. / Using a “limited memory” could be a way to create an internal definition of the extension of a website: we would reach its limits not only because we step inside something else, but because there is no more of its own space. / 3. being a software writing tool, it defines its basic units of writing (”text is stored as a chain of segments”) and test rules for semi-automatic editing. Red on white. Tyo. 2006-08-21 / 2:25 pm Red on white. Tyo. Abstraction / Simulation 2006-08-12 / 6:46 pm “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory … It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.” (Jean Baudrillard – Simulations) RE: Color and visual strata / discreteness and resolution - 2006-07-10 / 3:14 am “most notably it was predicted some 20 years before verification that marine fish that live just above the aphotic zone would have only one pigment, and that that one pigment would have a maximal sensitivity down around 450 nm (for us light at this wavelength would appear blue).” Diffusion Tensor Imaging 2006-05-27 / 4:54 am “Diffusion weighted imaging uses the diffusion of water molecules to probe the directional micro-structure of living tissue. A single diffusion weighted image generally measures diffusivity of water molecules along a particular direction. The amount of diffusion along a direction is detected by destructive interference of different phase signatures created by the magnetic gradient.” information 2006-04-12 / 2:16 am “information exchange is the ONLY way to ever get real change.” Throbbing Gristle – Re/Search Magazine 1982 maximum entropy probability distribution 2006-04-10 / 1:45 am In statistics and information theory, a maximum entropy probability distribution is a probability distribution whose entropy is larger than (or equal to) that of all other members of a specified class of distributions. If nothing is known about a distribution except that it belongs to a certain class, then the maximum entropy distribution for that class is often assumed “by default”, according to the principle of maximum entropy. The reason is twofold: first, maximizing entropy, in a sense, means minimizing the amount of prior information built into the distribution; second, many physical systems tend to move towards maximal entropy configurations over time. Via Abstract Dynamics 2006-03-21 / 9:04 pm Through out her writing danah constantly invokes a bottom up defense of youth culture. Essentially that the kids are alright they just need space and privacy to develop their own identities. It’s an argument I’m totally sympathetic to, but it becomes completely problematic when one realizes that something like MySpace just isn’t a traditional bottom-up youth culture situation at all. Rather it’s something more like an engine, a structure to contain the bottom up energy and transform it into something else entirely. The following hexadecimal data are the random bytes you requested. These data were generated by the Fourmilab HotBits radioactive RNG 2006-03-20 / 4:28 pm F 6 4 1 C 9 9 1 D 6 1 D 9 2 4 5 B 7 B 3 D 3 B 0 8 D 5 F 2 C 0 A 1 1 9 3 4 A 6 B 8 E B B 2 4 C 0 4 5 9 8 5 C 1 7 A 6 A 7 F A 6 2 C F A 1 C 9 8 4 E 4 B 6 5 A 0 1 2 7 0 3 C C 5 7 3 5 0 6 9 9 0 2 E 4 0 D 4 6 9 E 6 3 1 6 8 5 6 2 8 6 E 4 2 F 0 2 4 0 7 F 5 6 D C 3 9 8 4 C 7 5 F F 2 E 5 E 1 A D A 5 1 A F 8 C 1 4 B 4 1 2 7 9 9 B A E C 4 9 8 C 6 4 5 8 6 6 D 2 E 7 C 3 5 8 3 1 6 8 A C B 7 F 7 5 D 1 0 1 C 4 6 2 9 7 7 5 F C 1 9 9 E 2 3 3 0 4 4 2 4 5 4 B 8 8 7 2 6 2 5 6 E 5 6 B E 7 9 B B 3 B 2 3 9 A 2 8 0 5 7 F 7 0 2 B F Instrumental Reason: Thinking out possibilities / 4:22 pm And from noise: possibility, potential (and locate virtual [on the superiority of the analog]) Digital as numerical codification; Digital is possibility To be looked at: compression and noise / 4:20 pm Via Diehard test: “C:\Program files\ENT>ent xored.bin Entropy = 8.000000 bits per byte. Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 410820608 byte file by 0 percent. Chi square distribution for 410820608 samples is 243.08, and randomly would exceed this value 50.00 percent of the times. Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5014 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.141694679 (error 0.00 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is -0.000020 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0). C:\PROGRA~1\ENT>” 1+2+3+4+… 2006-03-07 / 10:05 pm “I do not like that presumptuous Philosophy which in its rage of explanation allows no xyz, no symbol representative of the vast Terra Incognita of Knowledge, for the Facts and Agencies of Mind and matter reserved for future Explorers.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge — via Crystalpunk manifesto “Concepts are wild (fuzzy) horses.” – Joan Watson re: Acoustic Resonances of Ancient Structures. 2006-02-16 / 10:03 pm “Modern building technology as well as building economics have indeed shown almost total disregard for the fact that human beings need rooms with good, “live” acoustic qualities. I am not talking about technical means of sound proofing and the like. Take the following solutions which are typical for our civilization: people are buried in rooms built out of concrete, and at the same time we are developing highly sophisticated stereo and quadro hifi technologies to allow some sounds to come alive in these spaces. In all the theory of modern architecture we find very little or nothing about the relationship of sound, space, and body. The main concern has been, as we all know, to use architecture and town planning as a means of resolving social conflicts and problems. But even this effort was essentially dominated by the powerful hostility with which the Enlightenment regarded the human body.” Norman White on Mistakology 2006-02-06 / 9:04 pm Every technology has its mistakes and accidents already built in. This insight is not new, but it is still consistently ignored in an approach to technology that demands it to be controllable and safe, functional and useful. Technical dysfunctionality is ‘repressed’ by modern society, in a Freudian sense. Functional discrepancies between people and machines are called ‘human failures’ even in cases in which the technology is making impossible demands on its human user. Machines and their mistakes are thus an inexhaustible source of humour and parody. Flavin 2006-01-27 / 12:11 am “… the title adds a whole new dimension to the work, referring as it does to a branch of medieval metaphysics called nominalism and specifically to the writings of the 14th-century Franciscan scholastic and philosopher William of Ockham. Ockham held that abstract concepts such as immortality can only be apprehended by faith, not by reason. He also said that if there were many explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest was the right one to use. You can see what attracted Flavin to his writings.” Random physical phenomena 2006-01-24 / 5:48 am Many modern random number generators attempt to use some form of quantum-mechanical noise, widely considered to be the gold standard for randomness. (For a discussion of empirical verification of quantum unpredictability, see Bell test experiments). Some phenomena used include: * A nuclear decay radiation source (as, for instance, from some kinds of commercial smoke-alarms), detected by a Geiger counter attached to a PC. * Atmospheric noise, detected by a radio receiver attached to a PC * Thermal or quantum-mechanical noise, amplified to provide a random voltage source. A favored source of noise is avalanche noise generated from a reverse-biased zener diode. The thermal noise from a resistor can also be used. One approach is to convert the noise source into random bits in a separate device that is then connected to the computer through an I/O port. The acquired noise signal is amplified, filtered, and then run through a high-speed voltage comparator to produce a logic signal that alternates states at random intervals. Care must be taken when amplifying low-level noise to keep out spurious signals, such as power line hum and broadcast transmissions. In some simple designs, this logic value is converted to an RS-232 level signal and sent directly to a computer’s serial port. Software then sees this series of logic values as bursts of “line noise” characters on an I/O port. More sophisticated systems may format the bit values before passing them into a computer. Another approach is to feed an analog noise signal to an analog to digital converter, such as the existing audio input port available on most personal computers. The digitized signal may then be processed further in software to remove any bias. Some have suggested using digital cameras, such as webcams, to photograph chaotic macroscopic phenomena. A group at Silicon Graphics imaged Lava lamps to generate random numbers. U.S. Patent 5732138 One problem was determining whether the chaotic shapes generated were random — the team decided that they are in properly operating Lava lamps. Other chaotic scenes could be employed, such as streamers blown by a computer’s exhaust fan or bubbles in a fish tank (fish optional). The digitized image will generally contain additional noise resulting from the video to digital conversion process. One commercial product, Quantis from id Quantique SA, exploits an elementary quantum optics process, sending photons one by one onto a semi-transparent mirror. The mutually exclusive events (reflection – transmission) are detected and associated to “0″ – “1″ bit values. Perhaps the most common approach is to use precise timing of the interrupts caused by mechanical input/output devices, such as keyboards and disk drives as a source of randomness. Done carefully (as in, for example, the Yarrow algorithm), enough entropy can be collected for the occasional creation of cryptographic keys and nonces. Apparent Randomness / 5:31 am Randomness coming from the environment (for example, brownian motion, but also hardware random number generators) Randomness coming from the initial conditions. This aspect is studied by chaos theory, and is observed in systems whose behaviour is very sensitive to small variations in initial conditions (such as pachinko machines, dice …). Randomness intrinsically generated by the system. This is also called pseudorandomness, and is the kind used in pseudo-random number generators. There are many algorithms (based on arithmetics or cellular automaton) to generate pseudorandom numbers. The behaviour of the system can be determined by knowing the seed state and the algorithm used. This method is quicker than getting “true” randomness from the environment. Accident(s) / 5:26 am An accident requires that the event in question was unforeseeable, unlikely or unpredictable. A criticality accident (also sometimes referred to as an “excursion” or “power excursion”) occurs when a nuclear chain reaction is accidentally allowed to occur in fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. This releases neutron radiation which is highly dangerous to surrounding personnel and which causes induced radioactivity in the surroundings. Uniform Distributions / 5:23 am The uniform distributions (continuous) are probability distributions such that all intervals of the same length are equally probable. Uses of the uniform distribution In statistics, when a p-value is used as a test statistic for a simple null hypothesis, and the distribution of the test statistic is continuous, then the test statistic is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1 if the null hypothesis is true. Although the uniform distribution is not commonly found in nature, it is particularly useful for sampling from arbitrary distributions. Randomness / 5:20 am Randomness should not be confused with practical unpredictability, which is a related idea in ordinary usage. Some mathematical systems, for example, could be seen as random; however they are actually unpredictable. This is due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (see chaos theory). Many random phenomena may exhibit organized features at some levels. When working with probability, it is often useful to run experiments such as computational simulations. Many programming languages have the ability to generate pseudo-random numbers which are effectively distributed according to the standard uniform distribution. Manifold 2006-01-13 / 1:31 am A manifold is a mathematical space which is constructed, like a patchwork, by gluing and bending together copies of simple spaces. For example, a circle can be constructed by bending two line segments into arcs which overlap at their ends and gluing them together where they overlap. The motivation for working with manifolds is that you begin with a relatively simple space which is well understood, and build up a manifold, which may be very complicated, from copies of that simple space. By choosing different spaces as base material, different kinds of manifolds can be constructed, such as topological manifolds and differentiable manifolds. via Cinema 1 2006-01-12 / 6:59 am Deleuze: “Philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object…So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’”. Statistically Improbable Phrases 2005-12-30 / 5:21 am Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. Re: Volcanic civilizations 2005-12-23 / 6:10 am The Minoans: Feared the bull, living symbol of the god of the Earth. “The bull dance.” Was likely destroyed by a tidal wave caused by one of the largest volcanic explosions in history. Volcanic events / 6:07 am Santorini eruption “changed the course of history.” Point events Reticular / Information 2005-12-22 / 2:05 am /”Resembling a net in form; netlike: reticular tissue.” /”Cell bodies of the reticular activating system are grouped in the brain stem, just behind the pons and in front of the cerebellum. Their axons reticulate out from there to various parts of the thalamus and cerebral cortex, providing the basis for the area’s name. This is an interesting configuration, given that the cerebral cortex is relatively recent with respect to evolution, while the brain stem’s design was finalized (or so one would think) long before.” /”The reticular activating system is the name given to part of the brain (the Reticular Formation and its connections) believed to be the centre of arousal and motivation in animals (including humans). It is situated at the core of the brain stem between the myelencephalon (medulla) and metencephalon (midbrain). It is involved with the sleep/wake cycle; damage can lead to permanent coma.” /”Information is a word which has many different meanings in everyday usage and in specialized contexts, but as a rule, the concept is closely related to others such as data, instruction, knowledge, meaning, communication, representation, and mental stimulus.” /”.info is a generic top-level domain intended for informative websites, although its use is not restricted. It was a part of ICANN’s highly publicized announcement, in late 2000, of a phased release of seven new generic top-level domains (gTLDs).” /”A direct relationship between information and another physical property, entropy, is demonstrated. A consequence is that it is impossible to destroy information without increasing the entropy of a system; in practical terms this often means generating heat.” Sentences regarding windows / 1:41 am /”What I saw that night was like looking at a hologram or window to another dimension.” /”It may be that there exists, in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and certain other nodal locations of electromagnetic gravitational currents, a door or window to another dimension in time or space through which extra-terrestrial sufficiently sophisticated scientifically can penetrate at will.” /”In science fiction, a portal is a window to another dimension.” /”Picard and Data arrive, and Manheim tells them he was able to open a window to another dimension, but when he learns how far the effect has spread, he tells them it must be shut down.” Stars / 1:38 am Rows of stars fill the emptiness – or, with their mute reiteration, create a nocturnal emptiness of their own. from Entropy and the New Monuments / 1:35 am Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock. On the use of color / 1:27 am A gratuitous use of color can be seen as the creation of a device that can be used to see “through” something. It is a surface of excess. Through excess any possibility of information is diminished and the surface collapses inward. Rocket Tests 2005-12-19 / 1:45 am In the early 1990s, the Deseret Morning News (then named the Deseret News) discovered that in 1965 a nuclear-powered rocket had been tested at the Nevada Test Site. Bolted down, the engine roared for 10 1/2 minutes, “sending skyward a plume of nearly invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust through a superheated uranium fission reactor,” wrote Lee Davidson, the paper’s Washington Bureau chief. “Three days later, the Atomic Energy Commission found radioactive iodine 131 in town water at Caliente, Nev.,” about 90 miles west of Cedar City. An AEC report said the fresh fission products probably came from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China. The Synergetic Natural Number Continuum 2005-12-15 / 10:59 pm The continuum of base ten number is generally looked upon as a progressive and linear series of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Iterations signify the simple addition of the initial unit to each resulting member encountered in the continuing series of elements known as numbes. The digits 1 – 9 are known as integers or numerals. Of course, multiples of 10, 100, 1000, etc. are formed simply by adding zeros. Further analysis discloses that this continuum can be viewed as both progressive and regressive. It is not exclusively linear, but has a cyclic function resulting from the terminal character of the last base digit and the next beginning initiated by zero producing the two-digit range. This doubling of number is for all practical purposes a cyclic function that recycles again and again with each ten-fold group produced. Besides the cyclic and ambidirectional aspects of the number series, there is also a periodic series of reversals that occur in conjunction with the cyclic aspect. Black Road / 10:56 pm The Long Count end date on December 21st, 2012 A.D. highlights an astronomical alignment determined by precession. The alignment occurs when the winter solstice sun conjuncts the crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic in Sagittarius. This crossing point is where the “dark rift” in the Milky Way is, which was known to the ancient Maya as xibalba be (the Road to the Underworld) or simply “the Black Road.” Linda Schele identifies the nearby crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic as the Mayan Sacred Tree, and the modern Quiche call that spot “Crossroads.” Null Hypothesis (2) / 10:51 pm The Maya revered the end-time as a zero point, entered through galactic centre and involving an energy field-effect reversal and rebirth into a new World Age. Absolute Future / 10:50 pm In Lorentzian manifolds, the absolute future of an event A is the region containing all the events which can be reached by traveling from A along a future-pointing null curve or timelike curve. Absolute past, the dual concept of absolute future or past-pointing curves. Alternate Hypothesis / 10:49 pm The alternate hypothesis, or alternative hypothesis, together with the null hypothesis are the two rival hypothesis whose likelihoods are compared by a statistical hypothesis test. Usually the alternate hypothesis is the possibility that an observed effect is genuine and the null hypothesis is the rival possibility that it has resulted from random chance. Null Hypothesis / 10:48 pm In statistics, a null hypothesis says “there is no phenomenon”. It is a hypothesis that is presumed true until statistical evidence in the form of a hypothesis test indicates otherwise. For example, if we want to compare the test scores of two random samples of men and women, a null hypothesis would be that the mean score in the male population from which the first sample was drawn was the same as the mean score in the female population from which the second sample was drawn. Levels of Nothingness / 5:41 am The next zone is the dysphotic zone, which extends from about 50 meters, or wherever the euphotic zone ends, to about 1,000 meters. In this zone, there is enough light for organisms to see, but it is too weak for photosynthesis to happen. If we were to venture into the dysphotic zone, we could watch the visible light disappear as we traveled deeper. Once we reached the aphotic zone, there would be no light. This zone extends from about 1,000 meters depth to the ocean bottom. Animals in this zone are rare, but they do exist. Think about the thriving hydrothermal vent communities, which live and prosper without sunlight. Loss of Color / 5:38 am Water particles interact with light by absorbing certain wave lengths (see diagram). First the reds and oranges disappear, later the yellows, greens and purples and last the blue. Loss of the colour red is dramatic and is already noticeable at 50cm! At 5 metres depth some 90% has disappeared. Surface effects / 5:37 am The shape of the water is decisive on how the light passes through it. Coming from an optically less dense medium (air) and entering a denser one (water), the light is partly reflected back while partly entering the water. Depending on the shape of the water, the light forms crinkle patterns or becomes diffused randomly in all directions. The amount of light that is reflected upward depends strongly on the height of the sun (place on Earth, time of day and season) and the condition of the sea. A rough sea absorbs more light whereas a mirror-like sea reflects more. In the tropics, the sun stands straight overhead at mid-day, resulting in little loss. In temperate seas during winter, the light diminishes by as much as 3 f-stops immediately under the surface. As a matter of interest, the reflected light is partly polarised (horizontally) and so is the part that enters the water (vertically). Polarisation is maximal in the early morning and late afternoon when the sun stands low in the sky. The vertically polarised light entering the water makes objects less shiny, more colourful, and can be used creatively, for instance to capture the deep colours of shiny fishes in natural light. Contextual Color 2005-12-03 / 7:56 pm Predecessor Patterns . . . (none) Problem Summary When color is used arbitrarily and gratuitously information is obscured. Crystal Language 2005-12-01 / 7:23 pm ‘Crystallography’ means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, ‘lucid writing.’ In the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals – looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, ‘a word is a bit of crystal in formation,’ suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form. Self-reference and the limits of logic / 6:41 am Ancient Greece: Epimenides of Crete: “All Cretans are liars.” If he’s telling the truth, he must be lying, but if he’s lying, then he’s telling the truth. 18th century: Barber of Seville: Everyone in town has barber cuts their hair, except those who cut their own hair. Who cuts the hair of the barber? Late 19th century: A. N. Whitehead: set theory will create universal axiomatic foundation for complete and self-consistent mathematics. B. Russell: What about the set of all sets which do not contain themselves?” Early 20th century: Vienna Circle: “Principia Mathematica,” (e.g. Logical Type Theory) to remove self-referential paradox. 1931: Godel’s Theorem: Typographical Number Theory created to show that no system can fully represent mathematics unless it is powerful enough to do self-reference, and no system with full self-reference can escape self-contradictory statements. Therefore, there will always be theorems whose truth or falsehood cannot be ascertained in any powerful system of mathematics. Alogon / 5:32 am Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 10:40:44 -0400 Reply-To: Discussion List on the History of Mathematics , John Conway From: John Conway Subject: Re: alogon Comments: To: Jim Propp In-Reply-To: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, Jim Propp wrote: > How is the word “alogon” (used by Proclus to describe irrationals, as I recall) > best translated? “Unutterable”, “illogical”, “unmeasurable”? > > That is to say, What was the meaning of “logos” in the context of non-Christian > fifth century Greek philosophy/mathematics? I continue: it then seems to have acquired the particular sense of “a collection of words There’s a long-standing connection between reason and ratio or proportion, and “analogy” is somewhere around here. “alogon” seems to mean something like “unreasonable”, “irrational”. JHC “, (Gk “lexis”), as in “Lexicon” (original meaning: phrase-book). Latin “Lex” for law, and so the English words like “legal”, come off around here. I might mention also “dialectics”. From here we get “writings”, passing into “theory” or “study”, as in the English “-logy” words. This in turn led to “reasoning”, and in particular the English word “logic”. Carl Sagan 2005-11-23 / 5:25 am Carl Sagan and The Edge of Forever Entropy and Points 2005-10-03 / 4:01 am If the universe can be considered to have increasing entropy, then, as Roger Penrose has pointed out, an important role in the disordering process is played by gravity, which causes dispersed matter to accumulate into stars, which collapse eventually into black holes. Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking have shown that black holes have the maximum possible entropy of any object of equal size. This makes them likely end points of all entropy increasing processes. Spaces 2005-09-27 / 6:28 pm “The future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson Henri Bergson – Homogeneous 2005-09-09 / 3:11 pm Time is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness. Sonic Fabric 2005-09-05 / 3:34 am Take an old tape walkman, unscrew the head and remount it on the outside of the plastic housing using silicone. Plug in the headphones, turn the volume all the way up, and press PLAY. Now run the head over the fabric. Works best if you drag it along in the same direction as the tape (as opposed to running it along the warp, which is cotton or polyester). Cymatics 2005-09-03 / 11:40 pm In his research with the tonoscope, Jenny noticed that when the vowels of the ancient internal languages of Hebrew and Sanskrit were pronounced, the sand took the shape of the written symbols for these vowels, while our modern languages, on the other hand, did not generate the same result. How is this possible? Did the ancient Hebrews and Indians know this? Is there something to the concept of “sacred language,” which both of these are sometimes called? What qualities do these “sacred languages,” among which Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese are often numbered, possess? Do they have the power to influence and transform physical reality, to create things through their inherent power, or, to take a concrete example, through the recitation or singing of sacred texts, to heal a person who has gone “out of tune”? Dragons – Monumentality 2005-08-24 / 7:41 pm “…while I understand those who call for texture and detail, if only for orientation, quite a bit of my journey has involved uncovering the meaning of distance and scale in these spaces. Even now the I find the ambiguity of scale compelling. All of the complex forms are basically shadows, given volume by a combined of 3D math and stereoptic input. The fog simultaneously hides the extent of the forms while revealing the depth of the shapes.” Music 2005-08-14 / 7:58 pm “Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like re were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, falling back, riding in again, and womens’s voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices doplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren’t drums at all.” William Gibson, Virtual Light Architeuthis (Giant Squid) 2005-08-02 / 4:12 pm Certain keywords: Laboratory, capture, vessels, sustain. Ocean plateau(s) Progenitor star (star that exploded) 2005-08-01 / 4:23 pm SN 2005cs belongs to a class of exploding stars called “Type II-plateau.” A supernova of this type results from the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star whose light remains at a constant brightness (a “plateau”) for a period of time. Vectors 2005-07-24 / 4:00 pm Energy has a shape. A given amount of energy traveling in some direction for a certain amount of time is called a “vector”. By experimentation it can be demonstrated that the only self-stabilizing combination of vectors is the triangle. So nature is building everything out of triangles. For some thing to be called “matter” it must have an inside and an outside, otherwise it is called “radiation”. Anything with an inside and an outside is called a “system”. By experimentation it can be demonstrated that the tetrahedron is the minimum shape or structure that energy can take. The minimum “thing” or system in the universe has to be a tetrahedron. Anything less is not a system and does not have the properties of a system. Systems can be made out of triangles. By experimentation it can be demonstrated that only 3 basic systems can be constructed out of equilateral triangles: tetrahedra, octahedra, & icosahedra. Therefore, all of nature must be built up from some combination or multiple of only those three basic systems. Synergetics is the geometry of energy. Double horizon plane; 2005-07-17 / 7:32 pm double curvature approach/transcend limit field. IRC 2005-07-11 / 3:41 am Many-to-Many Terraforming 2005-06-18 / 4:12 am Terraforming is a process of planetary engineering, specifically directed at enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings. M.J. Fogg, Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, SAE International (1995). Sourcing 2005-03-14 / 5:10 am Weather Pattern(s) Amygdala 2005-03-04 / 1:18 am A pair of structures that exist an inch or so in from the forehead. One on the right side and one on the left side. They have impact on mood. (The right one is active when a person is depressed, and the left one is active when a person is cheerful.) Also, they are associated with fear, and the “fight or flight” response. This is possibly instead mapped to the front and backs of both. Associated with religious experience. Elation / Fear Enatiamophic Chambers 2005-03-02 / 12:14 am Smithson dissected the illusion of vision in his “Enantiamorphic Chambers.” He stated: “To see ones own sight means visible blindness” Here the “object” became infinite myopia, equidistant dislocation, the manifestation of the division in the eyes.