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As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words.

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Everyone deserves everything.

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Intelligence is a unit of information driving a unit of energy.

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A codec does not really exist until everyone can decode it.

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Sentimentality for objects is a symptom of capitalism

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Some authors deserve to be replaced

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Cancer is a disease of information.

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Some texts aren’t accessible to all minds artificial or otherwise

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Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.

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[...] our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience.

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[...] people simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.

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The protocol doesn't judge your life choices.

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May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.

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[...] and I owe everything to Killing Joke, because Killing Joke was the principle of self-education that got me there

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Second, we must design for discovery rather than prediction, creating systems (from personal routines to whole cities) that can quickly detect and amplify what works rather than trying to foresee it in advance.

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I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

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It’s hard to imagine a prejudice more deeply ingrained than our prejudice against entities that are visibly spatially discontinuous

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Graphologically speaking, the art of Cy Twombly poses an aberration. His paintings feature handwritten words inscribed in such a way as to avoid offering any clues to him or his character or his inside state. Scribbled, scrawled, gauche, idle, unlovely – the hand is no one’s, or everyone’s, or mythic, or just a stain left behind by something written there before. A mark with no person in it. No shame.

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Handwriting is a mark from inside me that I put outside me, often with a view to showing, telling, communicating. It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the inscape’ out.

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The whole history of the universe can be understood as a sequence of condensations.

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The arrow of time in such a universe would, therefore, be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe.

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No thought can exist without a sustaining support

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Meanings that only a few have access to are secrets. In the absence of meaning, the illusion of a secret is created by imposing a subcultural barrier to entry where only through an opaque process of scene work can one ‘get’ it (or, if you’re unlucky: if you gotta ask you’ll never know…). Alternatively, they are wrapped in the veil of an elusive X-factor, to which only a privileged few, i.e. the creative director, have direct access.

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I've got a message for you; From the monopines

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One of the cruelest aspects of human ephemerality is that all the settled traditions, all the familiar experiences that feel so permanent and fundamental in childhood, are in fact the product of a contingent constellation of people whom death is always mowing down.

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Remember, you cannot make normal more normal because that is abnormal.

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Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.

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And more often than not, it’s the bag, because bags are easy to put on, take off, pass around. Bags fit everyone. You can wear them with cheap clothes and they still speak a universal language of luxe. Their transferability, combined with their much-vaunted sexual overtones (in Freudian terms, “the little bag [is] representative of the Venus shell, the female genitalia”), make bags particularly powerful coins in the oneiric currency of symbols.

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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work.

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I wouldn't want to be found dead next to a psychic.

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When even the label is identical to the official version, what’s the difference? The intangibles of buying in a high-end store? The tissue wrapping and branded ribbons? All the things that disappear from the item as soon as it’s worn or used?

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Then there are “ghost shift” fakes, made at the same factories that produce the “authentic” items, out of hours, producing hauntological pieces that fit Jaques Derrida’s definition of “a shadow of ontology, the ghost of a metaphysics.” Haunted by a state of non-being, these items both are and are not originals.

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He said, ‘Look, it’s all the same thing. Movie business, construction business: it’s telling people what you want, and making sure they do it.’

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It is a mystery how things come to belong to us and even more why from certain things it is impossible to part [...]

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THIS ESSAY IS ENCHANTED with sanctity in a heterodox sense, as a state of being outré, out of the way, surprised, surprising. We want to see a naked sanctity, the saint denuded of doctrinal dress, a kind of holiness we cannot properly look upon. In order to achieve this vision, to produce the appearance of what is not given to gaze at directly, our essay works by a kind of hermeneutic triangulation, taking aim at a space between and within a saint and a transgressor of the sacred: Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Actaeon. Distant, Angela and Actaeon are yet next to each other in fascinating ways related to language, body, presence, vision, and metamorphosis. Like two stars in a constellation, they are close in separation, far apart only to appear impossibly proximate. Most conspicuously, Angela and Actaeon are corporeally near in nakedness and disintegration. Where Angela strips herself to stand naked before the cross, Actaeon is rendered animally nude by mutation into a stag. Where Actaeon is torn apart by his hounds after seeing a god- dess, Angela’s limbs are separated when God enters and withdraws from her body. The where of these conjunctions, the unwitnessable place they reveal, is an unseeable state of identity between transgression and sanctity. We call this secret locale dislocation.

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I would like to create the 0.1-second sound which condenses all emotions in the universe. When I listen to it, maybe my mind and existence itself will collapse.

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Some years ago, after having a weeping eye repeatedly misdiagnosed, Mr. Serra learned from his doctors that he had cancer of the tear duct in his left eye. He was told that the remedy was simple — they would have to remove the eye — but that the prognosis was good. Typically undaunted and determined not to compromise his vision or his work as an artist, Mr. Serra declined the surgery.

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Style is never a fiction, it is only it.

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Once you see intelligence as something embodied by particular pile of data rather than a particular kind of processing, a very powerful sort of decentering of anthropocentric conceits happens; a Copernican consciousness shift gets triggered. You are no more than the sum of data you’ve experienced. A big memory with a small shell script aside. And once you get over the trauma of that realization, you realize something even bigger: any pile of data that has some coherence in its source can be turned into an intelligence that you can relate to, broadening the possibilities of your own existence.

Tacit Knowledge

We can know more than we can tell.

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Beige flags

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This says something about queerness as the performative use of language, not to describe objects directly but to synthesize text with texture to create a situation – a little like a fashion editorial with its vital descriptive captions, which Roland Barthes called the “vestimentary linguistics.” “It is not the object but the name that creates desire; it is not the dream but the meaning that sells,” he wrote in The Fashion System (1967). If desire is the hinge on the epistemological closet door that links the IRL texture to the text, Barthes aligns desire with capitalism: with what “sells.”

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Assume everyone is grieving

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Baby, I can't text you, I'm not a author

Solaris

What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women—and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again. I shall find new interests and occupations; and I shall not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody. Perhaps at night I shall stare up at the dark nebula that cuts off the light of the twin suns, and remember everything, even what I am thinking now. With a condescending, slightly rueful smile I shall remember my follies and my hopes.

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We have done so much with so little for so long, that now we can do anything with nothing.

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Banks are speculative investment funds grafted on top of critical infrastructure

Duration Piece

On December 31st, 1973, Douglas Huebler photographed a woman, an eight of a second before midnight. the exposure time was one fourth of a second, so the woman had half of her body in 1973 and the other half in 1974. In 2006, João Onofre similarly shot a woman within the transition between spring and summer (title: Duration, variable and location piece)

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In fact, we might be entering a moment when the very purpose of art is to slow things down; to afford friction; to refuse easy translation into information.

Measuring the Thermodynamic Cost of Timekeeping

This work suggests that clocks, like other engines such as motors and computers, obey a fundamental performance limit determined by the laws of thermodynamics. There is no such thing as a free minute—at least if you want to measure it.

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A language must be found . . . This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul . . . Poetry will not lend its rhythm to action, it will be in advance [en avant]. These poets will exist.

A Candle

A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human — 80 to 100 watts, also consuming about the same amount of oxygen and producing the same amount of CO2. In an enclosed area, adding candles is about like adding people from an air quality standpoint.

Identity

Identity is a stable logical entity associated with a series of different values over time. And time is just a by-product of ordering states within an identity.

Solaris

You're not a woman and you're not a human being. Understand that, if you're capable of understanding anything. There is no Hari. She's dead. You're just a reproduction, a mechanical reproduction. A copy. A matrix. — Yes. Maybe. But I ... I am becoming a human being. I can feel just as deeply as you. Believe me.

In Praise of Stuff

One of the cruelest aspects of human ephemerality is that all the settled traditions, all the familiar experiences that feel so permanent and fundamental in childhood, are in fact the product of a contingent constellation of people whom death is always mowing down. As the years go by, every physical element of these vanishing times, every object that can establish continuity with them and the people who left them behind, grows in significance.

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“We want to be a post-Apple company. We want to do things they can’t do,” Marmeladov tells me. “They have to show a product because of the investors and the industry. We can afford not to show the product. So we were thinking, we shouldn’t design anything at this point. We should design the behavior rather than the product.”

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A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come.

Rack City

3 notes. 808 kick snare clap snap cymbal and the chant. Let's make a hit

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Duncan says that the secret to writing a good palindrome lies in finding its middle, its center. You have to identify "the letter on which the palindrome is going to pivot and turn," he explains.

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[...] All the poet wished to be was human. "And that seems objectionable to a young man?" somebody who has ceased to be one asks with suppressed indignation. "What does he want the poet to be? A bird, an icthyosaurus, a dodecahedron?." I can't say. However, I believe that the young poet when writing poetry simply wishes to be a poet. [...] The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent. [...] The poet aggrandizes the world by adding to reality, which is there by itself, the continents of his imagination. Author derives from *auctor*, he who augments. It was the title Rome bestowed upon her generals when they had conquered new territory for the City.

Classical Art

The idea of classical art, in making it, is that this object, this vessel, is really, in a sense, just a container for meaning. If I pour some meaning into it, in my studio... on the basis of that meaning, I'm able to move it from my studio all the way over to my gallery and nothing of consequence is changed. Now, that's pretty interesting. Don't you think? That this thing, I can move from one set of circumstances, one set of environments, one set of conditions... It can go to a completely different set of conditions and nothing of consequence is lost. The idea of being able to transcend that distance. Now, if I were able to take and put enough meaning into this... so something really of some great significance... I could maybe even attempt to take it from my middle of nowhere, growing up in L.A., to New York... all the way to New York and they would understand it. [...] If I fill it up enough and the meaning becomes a real consequence, I might even be able to transcend my generation. Or maybe I could move it from L.A. to India, and since it's so essentially human, so critical, it would mean the same thing to them, and they would understand it. That's a really pretty idea. And when you look at the history of classical art: that kind of level of content, that kind of level of seriousness, that kind of subject matter, it was very important to the paintings. And it has since got to the point where the kind of high ideal is the transcendence of time, that, i.e., art is timeless.

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Some things can’t be abridged.

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Just as “marriage” doesn’t really make sense for one person, Arendt simply claimed that “freedom” doesn’t make sense for a single person, or even for a single person in an undifferentiated mass of humans.

Mutualism

The usual term of art in political science for the idea that “individual” in isolation might not be a well-posed concept seems to be mutualism. The first and best version of the concept is the one I encountered in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (though she doesn’t use the term), but it probably has a more complicated provenance. The basic idea is that a human who acts like an idealized individual is in fact in a degenerate subhuman condition. In her formulation, mutualism is characterized by true freedom, which can only be experienced in the presence of a plurality of other free individuals. Plurality is the load-bearing notion in her formulation, and in my opinion the main element of any well-formed notion of mutualism. It is an element which is lost in communist and fascist notions of mutualism, which look superficially similar. In those, you get the sense that the object of interest is a mass of fungible bodies bound by a solidarity of shared pain, shared identity, or both. I’ll call these latter varieties of group conditions pseudo-mutualisms to distinguish them.

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You destroy your life every time you make a choice. The end is built into the beginning.

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A model might show you some risks, but not the risks of using it. Moreover, models are built on a finite set of parameters, while reality affords us infinite sources of risks.

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Ironically, modernists fall for what I have called the opiate of the middle classes, that is social science and stock market speculation. They refuse religion on rational grounds, then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts, and psychologists. We know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology; stock market analysts are more pompous but much less elegant than the bishop, and psychology papers do not replicate meaning their results do not hold.

Twisted Devices

Creating a working device typically takes them dozens of tries. And even then, each device behaves differently, so specific experiments are almost impossible to repeat.

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Data at-rest in SSDs isn't really at rest. The controller is constantly scrubbing and correcting errors.

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The work showed that “you don’t need space to do geometry,” Huh said. “That made me really fundamentally rethink what geometry is.”

Trend Forecasting

Spend seven days noticing what you are noticing. Walk down the street and unfocus your eyes, observing which colours or textures or words or objects appear. Make notes of these as they arise.

Every morning upon waking do three pages of automatic writing – let your mind outpace its internal censor and scribble, scribble, scribble. When your three pages are complete, make a list of three things you remember people saying from the day before (these can be live remembrances, or from the Internet).

After the week is done, sit down with these notes and read them through like a magazine, noting any clusters of three that pop out. These can be tightly linked (all are related to the colour red) or loosely (all remind you of healthcare, or corruption, or new poetry).

Make a new list, in which you attempt to give a catchy, short name to each of these clusters of three.

Pick three of the clusters of three and go online, gathering any images you associate with each one into its own folder or Are.na channel. After this exercise, note any new associations that may have emerged.

Now, with images and words linked together, get very quiet and imagine yourself talking to a smart friend. What kind of predictions about each cluster would you make in that conversation? More red? More corruption, but X kind, not Y? Widespread poetic computation? And so on. Write these down as well.

The catchy title, list of textual noticings, images and predictions all together are your trend forecast.

Rinse and repeat.

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The room is full of fear

With empty wavelength touch

It's coming in a rush

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The Conscience has eclipsed the Scriptures; Science has destroyed the belief in Divine Interposition; Democracy and Civism have shown men how to help themselves… a radical reconstruction of belief has become inevitable.

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Molecular horology

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And as I grow, I grow collective

A Day in the Life of a Musician

An artist must regulate his life.

Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.)

Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.

I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.

My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely.

I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

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Of course, it’s very hard to build models from your own data if you don’t have a lot of data and the only way to get a lot of data is to lose a bunch of money. […] The punchline is you only find out what works when you use the data that describes your own system, and that means processing a lot of transactions and bracing for impacts because a lot of the transactions are gonna go sour. One of the things that happens for a brand-new launched credit card: done right, you lose about 50% of the dollar volume in the first several months which is terrifying because it’s half the money, literally.

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The most valuable data is not social data, not what you ate for lunch, not even debt-to-income ratio, even though you know that’s fairly predictive, but your own data because every dataset that you’re looking at internally describes your own process, including your bugs, including your delays, including what changed, including the merchant base that you sign and the merchant base that churned. All those changes to your system are encoded in your own logs and building models from your own data is the only way to build a really successful system.

What are your thoughts on dub?

Richard : We’ve said this before, so I apologize for repetition but it’s the idea that the sound you put down onto tape is not necessarily the sound that will be on the finished record.

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Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.).

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Note that all complicated and violent experiments defeat themselves.

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Spindle whorls aided in the making of cloth for garments and bedding. They were placed in tombs, perhaps so that the deceased could continue to spin wool in the afterlife.

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Water is taught by thirst

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Ideas like “building a second brain” leverage this basic new potentiality in the human condition; our newfound ability to age faster than we can live, by using machines to do much of the superhistorical living for us.

Mostly Empty Time

Every scientific or technological revolution tears down yet another anthropocentric conceit. This one is tearing down the conceit that our lives are significant in informational terms. That every life story is full of unique richness worth the narration.

The humbling thing about the rise of machine learning is not that it shows us how stupid we are in “intelligence” terms, but how empty our lives are, in terms of their information content.

This moment in history is like the moment when the structure of the atom was deciphered and we realized that seemingly solid matter was better understood as mostly empty space shaped by fields.

In the last decade, we’ve discovered that human lives are mostly informationally empty time, existing in a meager set of threads with the superhistorical time computers are starting to inhabit.

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Word recognition is quicker with sans-serif fonts by an average of 8 ms.

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[...] “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive.

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Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

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Ritual is a machine for the destruction of time

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The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing. ;-)

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There’s just too much of everything. There are too many different Oreos. 65 flavours in 8 years is too many. Too many Hot Chicken Wing Oreos, Waffle & Syrup Oreos, Jelly Donut Oreos, Supreme Oreos. There’s too much content that appears different but is the same. Too many identities are available to us. Too many manias. Too many hysterias. Examine nearly any aspect of society and you can see it’s gone too far. The reason so many flavours of Oreos are invented, according to the cookie’s brand director, is that this overabundance of choice reminds us of and drives us back to the original. It reminds us of how much we like the old Oreo, the Platonic ideal of the Oreos of childhood, the Proustian Oreo with the glass of cold milk. When there’s too much of everything however, at some point the original is lost, the memory is lost, and all that remains are faded, flat, hollowed-out derivatives.

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The universe is full of entropy, might as well put it to work for you.

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The medical profession, and the government agencies that regulate it, are accustomed to risk and have systems to manage it. The problem is that classical medicine is tuned to "continuous risks." If the Risk of 100 mg of aspirin is "1 risk unit" and the risk of 200 mg of aspirin is "2 risk units" then the risk of 150 mg of aspirin is strongly likely to be between 1 and 2, and it definitely won't be 1,000,000. The mechanisms we use to regulate medicine, with dosing trials, and pharmacokinetic studies, and so forth are based on this assumption that both benefit and harm are continuous functions of prescribed dose, and the physician's job is to find the sweet spot between them.

When you let a computer handle a treatment you are exposed to a completely different kind of risk. Computers are inherently binary machines that we sometimes make simulate continuous functions. Because computers are binary, there is a potential for corner cases that expose erratic, and as this case shows, potentially fatal behavior. This is not new to computer science, but it is very foreign to medicine. Because of this, medicine has a built in blind spot in evaluating computer technology.

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There is no threshold after which it is not worth fighting.

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The 90s are the 60s upside down.

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The nature of volatility is that it desensitizes over time.

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Don’t fall in love with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself.

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I could read a billion books still not know what pill I took.

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A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space. Conversely, in a slovenly setting the tendency is for the page to appear as a grey and muddled pattern of isolated spats, this effect being caused by the over-widely separated words. The normal, easy, left-to-right movement of the eye is slowed simply because of this separation; further, the short letters and serifs are unable to discharge an important function—that of keeping the eye on "the line". The eye also tends to be confused by a feeling of vertical emphasis, that is, an up & down movement, induced by the relative isolation of the words & consequent insistence of the ascending and descending letters. This movement is further emphasized by those "rivers" of white which are the inseparable & ugly accompaniment of all carelessly set text matter.

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For this reason, and a personal affinity with the various streams of Chan and Zen, there was from the very beginning of MBSR an emphasis on non-duality and the non-instrumental dimension of practice, and thus, on non-doing, non-striving, not-knowing, non-attachment to outcomes, even to positive health outcomes, and on investigating beneath name and form and the world of appearances, as per the teachings of the Heart Sutra, which highlight the intrinsically empty nature of even the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and liberation itself and yet are neither nihilistic nor positivistic, but a middle way (see Kabat-Zinn 2003, 2005f; Wallace and Hodel 2008).

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I see religion for what it really is: just a bluff

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When Brian Eno lectured at RBMA in New York a couple of months back, he described [James] Blake as an artist who “works mostly by subtraction, he takes lots of stuff out and ends up with very skeletal pieces.”

Blake watched the Eno lecture yesterday, and he nods avidly when I repeat this analysis of his working process back to him. “One part [of a song] that doesn’t mean anything really pisses me off. Genuinely, it irritates me if there’s something that doesn’t need to be there. The thing is, it happens in other music as well; I’m not too fascist about it when it comes to other people’s music, but when it comes to mine I really try to do a spring clean on the track, to make sure that everything that needs to be there is there, and nothing extraneous is left just buzzing in the background, clattering and distracting me from the main idea."

Fuck Seth Price

When you start out as a young artist, she thought, it’s all about open doors. You have nothing, no one knows your name, no one wants you. As your career picks up steam, every new event is a miracle: your first group show, and then your first solo, your first mention in a magazine, your first sale, your first good review, your first bad review, your first show in Europe, your first show at an institution, your first high-profile biennial exhibition, your first cover story. It’s a tremendous personal high, all these avenues opening, and moreover it’s accompanied by public fanfare, because art-world people get swoony and excited about this early door-opening phase; they act like parents fussing over the parade of birthdays and bar mitzvahs and commencements and first apartments. For many this is simply the blind pursuit of the new, and for some it represents craven calculation. On the other hand, good careers usually begin with a wildly fecund period—brief, just five years or so—during which all the major themes and perversions are proposed in concentrated form, and people find it genuinely exciting to witness new concepts being willed into existence.

All this dies down. You work steadily for a while, say, ten years, and you consider yourself lucky, because you have a career and you show your work, and sometimes you make more money or less money, and people might like your current work more or less than your last efforts, but the great thing is that all the doors continue to stand open, and things are functioning. You are now a part of the machine.

Gradually, however, you become aware of encroaching problems. It’s hard to voice these concerns, since you don’t want to be an ungrateful ass, but they eat away at you. It’s not because people no longer swoon over you, although becoming a part of the scenery hurts. More worrisome is that once all of the doors have been opened, the only thing they can do is close: the collectors and curators lose interest, the quality of your work declines, or you simply run out of ideas. However, even this is not the most difficult thing. The biggest problem is that when the doors are open and you’re a part of the machine, you realize This is it, there’s nothing else.

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It’s the opposite of what I associated with bird calls. It feels like there’s nothing repetitive. I mean there is if you listen long enough, but it feels like there are many owls participating in this dynamic. I always think of it as an opera. When I’m listening to the owls I’m thinking there’s got to be some narrative I’m missing here. It’s so exquisite and I love that it’s all in the dark.

Serra on Site/Non-Site

No. Artists have their own ways of doing things, and you can’t be putting them down. I see documentation as an attribute, just as I see language as an attribute. The non-sites ended up being a road show, without commitment to any specific place. The concept of the non-site is a theoretical justification for homeless objects.

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His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

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It seems that programming your own software and designing your own sounds is a crucial part of Autechre’s music.

BOOTH I’ve heard people say, “I’ll just pay somebody to do it for me,” and I’ll think, well, surely you’re not going to have all the weird little sort of ideas or thoughts along the way. It’s almost taking the joy out of it for yourself. I don’t know where it was decided that that work is necessarily soulless work, and that you can’t be inspired while you’re doing it. I quite like to build things and then forget how it works and then use it later on, and not really be able to remember what I was thinking about when I built it. It’s a little bit like working with yourself in a way, but from a time when you’re not aware of what you were thinking. You can get reacquainted with it in a sense, like you would with a person.

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Suppose you are looking at a turned acrylic vase on a lamp stand. You might see loads of different layers, but it’s been on a lathe and it’s been curved and you’ll see a silhouette, and you’ll see light travel through it. You’ll get ideas about what its construction is or what its materials are but you still see one surface, one curve.

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Failure permeates this cycle of struggles [...]

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Astrology was perhaps the first important attempt to establish a theory of alogical incompatibilities and noncausal correspondences.

You’re not supposed to be here

A lot of people seem to feel about the runway the way they feel about paintings: “Wow, it’s in a painting, what an honor, this painter must love this subject.” But it doesn’t have to be that way, you know. Aspiration, which is what the runway represents now, can be awful. And it should be! It’s really screwy to feel like you want something right now, like you want to spend thousands of dollars on...a shirt, don’t you think? But when a designer suggests as much, the fashion world gets all freaked out or confused or angry. Shouldn’t we be ecstatic when someone makes us grapple with these kinds of questions?

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Make Invalid States Unrepresentable.

Not only does this reduce the number of states your system can be in (and thus make it simpler), but it reduces the number of invalid states, which is even better! Your system does not have to handle these states because they literally cannot be represented in your program.

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According to some calculations, the cosmos might have cooled so quickly that the fabric of space-time became fractured, creating a network of whisper-thin tubes filled by pure energy that stretch across the breadth of the observable universe.

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A partial view of the ruins of Babylon from Saddam Hussein's Summer Palace

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Wave had a property I love in my tools that I haven’t seen articulated anywhere: It was a general purpose medium (like paper). Unlike a lot of other tools, it doesn’t force you into its own workflow. You could use it to do anything from plan holidays, make a wiki, play D&D with your friends, schedule a meeting, etc.

"A general purpose medium"

Rayo's Number

The smallest number bigger than any finite number named by an expression in the language of set theory with a googol symbols or less.

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Metaphor, linking distant things, fractures that double rigidity.

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Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos, prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking ... Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue.

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All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.

Yann LeCun

There is an objective reality. But probabilities (or other means of prediction) reflect your own knowledge (or ignorance) about reality. Not something intrinsic to reality.

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Ultimately, all measures of distributions, information, entropy, complexity and dependency are in the eye of the beholder.

Shane

This town is what everybody says it is. We hire models to say words they don’t even understand and then light them well. Only one percent of that is worth watching. The confusion is, we get to go to the same building to watch a fucking “Garfield” cartoon and “Phantom Thread,” as if those two are the same things.

Black Dresses

how the FUCK does language work
what do people like to hear??

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An honest statement is necessary: Fashion at high prices no longer means exclusivity,” Pilati said in a release. “My response is to produce moderately priced clothes—‘the low’— and present them in a high fashion context, creating limited-edition items which by quality of design will justify the proposal—‘the high.’

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James Baldwin explained why black people don't have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children. By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs. That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.

Why do we need to see?

We use vision to understand our environment - our agent does the same. Here we will see vision is dimensionality reduction - the process of reducing high dimensional data into a lower dimensional space.

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Chang’s approach to food is cerebral; he claims to be better at thinking about food than cooking it. For him, hitting the right flavor is grounded in Hofstadter’s idea of the strange loop: when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

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I also recall Conway spending several weeks trying to construct a strange periscope-type device to try to help him visualize four-dimensional objects by giving his eyes vertical parallax in addition to the usual horizontal parallax, although he later told me that the only thing the device made him experience was a headache.

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The enemy is invisible and insidious, gathering strength from the bonds of human connection. So public health officials were asking people the world over to sever those ties.

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The first thing to understand is that whatever future threats we’re going to face already exist; they are currently circulating in wildlife. Think of it as viral dark matter.

Kiefer

A way to hide something by expanding internal space.

Present

[...] The present is a Markov blanket that insulates the past from the future [...]

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I come from an era of hi-fi. The whole idea of having a sound system do the work—that the music is reproduced through a sound system—is the very essence of the music. I just did this three-hour concert in Luxembourg and it was all on one file. I play the file and then play solitaire on my phone, out of sight. I practice a lot. If I don’t play solitaire every few days I get a little bit jittery. It’s very concentrating because you have to really look at the cards carefully.

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Personal brand is a speech act, a way to enact a reality, without necessarily having to live it.

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Candid photographs may not be posed, but they are selected.

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Ethics is a tending of coming-together, a caring for belonging as such.

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“She” argues that suffering and pain can only exist within a body, and thus any impetus to resistance to the literal programming of phrase regimens (computer programming being the most purified form of what Lyotard had called discourse in Discourse, Figure) would disappear. This surmise is no longer hyperbolic: there are myriad research programs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for performing precisely what Lyotard suggests, namely making thought go on without a body, though whether one could call this thought in the full sense is precisely why Lyotard calls this the “sole question” facing humanity, given that it goes to what we mean by the word human.

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Isn't anything that comes from a place of authority a priori boring?

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The archives of the state. Catechise the architect. Tread on the chamomile. Strychnine is poison.

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Maybe I need to just give up and accept that fashion is a ground zero for broken language and mercenary meaning that fucks off on the job.

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When it comes to selling artworks, Rakowitz sees consent and collaboration as fundamental parts of any business agreement. “I think that every artist should be engaged in conversations about where it is that they want their work to end up,” he said. Artists can take initiative, he added, and provide gallerists and curators with a vision—“not just of the career that they want to have,” he said, “but of the world that they want to propose within that career.”

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I think I like truly scary psychological thrillers because it can let me know that the horror I feel when I’m simply spiralling for a reason that is so pitiful in the scheme of things, a mere setback compared to the horror some people suffer consistently, or once, and then forever, is recognized. A writer can create the most awful version of something and contain it in an enacted plot, and the curtain of fiction places it into the same exact brain space as my real horror, however contained it is in my own consciousness. Because mostly my life is idyllic, with nothing wrong with it, and even that very fact is frightening – something else must be happening behind that curtain, waiting to terrorize me with its reality.

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Because many words can be extended with prefixes (such as "un-" or "anti-" or "re-") or suffixes (such as "-ly" or "-ing" or "-ness"), a comprehensive list of words prone to misspelling would contain thousands of variations from combining prefixes or suffixes (or both) added to the root words. To limit the scope to common words, the top 350 words are considered (according to various sources).

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Because sexiness is ridiculous: an imaginary, ephemeral thing, like personal style or the English language. Everyone knows that trying to understand it is in direct competition with appreciating it.

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We now know that cancer is a disease of altered cell survival, not excessive proliferation. That is, cancer doesn’t grow too much, it dies too little.

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Their grammar fails them and they can express only “heaps” of words. The order of the words becomes chaotic and any words with purely grammatical functions (reference words like he, she, it; conjunctions like and and but; articles like a and an) tend to drop out of the picture all together. These aphasics thus tend to sound infantile and can manage only very short sentences.

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One estimate suggests that for every person alive, there may exist 21 feet of borehole hollowed out in pursuit of geothermal energy, and natural gas, oil, and other hydrocarbons. Even as human toil compiles new kinds of useful metals and crystals aboveground, it creates airy space where raw resources were once bestrewn below.

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Even at the end of the twentieth century, no one would have ever thought to call a truck driver a “cognitive worker,” an intellectual. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the use of machine learning in the development of self-driving vehicles has led to a new understanding of manual skills such as driving, revealing how the most valuable component of work, generally speaking, has never been merely manual, but also social and cognitive (as well as perceptual, an aspect of labor still waiting to be located somewhere between the manual and the cognitive). What kind of work do drivers perform? Which human task will AI come to record with its sensors, imitate with its statistical models, and replace with automation?

Exceptions

Exceptions provide the most value when you throw them the farthest.

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When he was competing in Abu Dhabi’s Submission Grappling World Championship and Mundials, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, we were streaming his sparring sessions every night. So he was basically showing his competitors what he was about to use against them in two weeks and three weeks and four weeks. His attitude about this was just completely unique, is if you’re studying my game, you’re entering my game and I’ll be better at it than you.

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For example, the cozyweb could evolve from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips.

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...every piece of plastic ever made is still around...

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This is how we learned in Detroit. Some DJs learned via other DJs, like Ken Collier. He was really the master at that. But he did it in a way that was even more unusual. Because you could hear the mix, but before you know it, the track was gone. It's like watching a magician. You see the big elephant, you see the curtain go down, the curtain goes up and the elephant's gone. That was the way he used to mix. You'd listen to it, and follow it, but it would disappear, and you could not track its movement.

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Memory is a choice.

Carl Craig

When I remix a track I must listen to the same loop more than 10000 times. There are always secrets and treasure hidden deep within the loop.

SF

You can’t knob the hills.

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The important thing to remember is that for people with ADHD in particular, every escape is also an entrance.

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As a mind designer you are aware that you can configure your own hard disc. The basic question is: How do I find my personal bliss? How can you be convincing during a presentation? Very simple: When you enter the room you touch objects. Later on, you stand in front of a window (aura boost) and your gaze is roaming through the room. The objects you touched earlier remind you to smile.

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But maybe these young entrepreneurs like Antoine Arnault are right: Who really cares where the grooves in the aluminum suitcases come from? That they were derived from lightweight aviation construction? Is that still relevant? What seems iconic and precious today was profoundly radical at the beginning.

Is that why you did it?

Nope. We thought it might look interesting. I am always looking for the code of now.

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Suddenly it hits you: you’re not twenty; you’re not young anymore […] and in the meantime, while you were thinking about something else, the world has changed. The succession of my ideas was interrupted, and now it’s hard for me to resume it, because those ideas no longer correspond to anything objective, which means that they’re not really ideas. I want to be completely sincere about this, but to tell the truth I no longer know if I’m thinking or raving.

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Dolce and Gabbana flawlessly captures the imagination of the one percent. Outrage and ignorance are its diffusion line for the rest of the world.

Shuffling

[...] there's still some trace of the original order ... but it vanishes exponentially fast.

Stories

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder and CEO, credits Snapchat for developing the stories format. But he says it was always bound to surface in other apps. “My thesis is a story is a slideshow format,” Systrom said in an interview with The Verge. “Just like when Facebook invented the [News] Feed, and every social product was like, ‘That’s an innovation, how do we adapt that to our network?’ You’re going to see stories pop up in other networks over time, because it’s one of the best ways to show visual information in chronological order.”

Fern Flower

St John’s night is the shortest night of the year. It is on this night that the legendary Fern Flower blooms somewhere in the forest. The golden flower, with its mysterious glowing centre, blooms for only one night until dawn.

Beauty and Toxicity

The pigments are all heavy metals. Beauty and toxicity are very simple and strange; there is a correlation that I haven’t figured out.

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Ambient as in it, the product, emerges from systems it is entangled within?

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It doesn’t matter what you do—it matters that you appear busy, that you have places to be, that you move. The rolling suitcase is the product embodiment of mobility.

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We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends, we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.

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The most profound technologies are those that disappear.

Paradise Lost VII.176–8

Immediate are the acts of God, more swift Than time or motion, but to human ears Cannot without process of speech be told.

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My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt themselves, and they point to the table they just walked into.

The shape of a hole

The results indicate that holes are perceived as shaped in the same way as their material counterparts. We conclude that the shape of a hole is encoded as the shape of its interior region, even though that region contains no surface material.

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Something, somewhere, is always playing dice.

Identity

By identity I mean a stable logical entity associated with a series of different values over time.

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If we look at an empty sphere from without, we see a solid volume. If we enter the sphere we see
about us a surface that limits the interior concavity.

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PROXIMATE vision dissociates, analyzes, distinguishes — it is feudal. DISTANT VISION synthesizes, combines, throws together — it is democratic.

Your Calendar

Your calendar is not an empty container. It is a landscape of invisible energy and emotion associated with all the things that are going on in your life.

Track Pants

Unlike natural fabrics, polyester doesn’t vary enough to be stratified by quality. Yet it is now, by price. A polyester garment from Walmart or from a luxury designer will use the same petroleum to create the same reaction between acid and alcohol. The tensile result is unnatural, and thus less vulnerable to erosion from wear and washing, or decomposition once discarded. The prevalence of these fabrics marks 2018 in ways that will be visible long after the trends have passed.

Hard Work

Moreover, while readiness to recognize alternative worlds may be lib- erating, and suggestive of new avenues of exploration, a willingness to welcome all worlds builds none. Mere acknowledgement of the many available frames of reference provides us with no map of the motions of heavenly bodies; acceptance of the eligibility of alternative bases produces no scientific theory or philosophical system; awareness of varied ways of seeing paints makes no picture. A broad mind is no substitute for hard work.

Fluorescent

Fluorescent works by taking nonvisible wavelengths and converting them into visible light, so you wind up with something brighter than the surrounding. In fabric this is only easily done with polyester.

Congealed Electricity

The debate about the future of the industry often concentrates on the high energy usage associated with aluminium production. The joke description of aluminium as “congealed electricity” is never far away.

Electricity Solidified

Someone I know, who worked in the smelting and mineral refining industry, described aluminium as solidified electricity. Despite being the most abundant metal on Earth, aluminium is hard to extract from its ore (bauxite) and requires a hefty energy input to reduce it to metallic form. This is conventionally done using electrolysis of molten alumina at very high current densities. Consequently, the embodied energy in the resulting metallic aluminium ingots is huge and amounts to solid electricity.

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The worst domain expert is the one whose expertise was built from the intricacies of the existing systems.

Coffee Table

Instead of naming a product with its intended purpose—like, “coffee table”—MUJI prefers open-ended labels such as “oak table.” This gives users the creative freedom to designate the table’s ultimate purpose.

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I do like having a place to show up at so that I don’t die and no one notices [...]

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But it's interesting as well with family. I don't know if you know about formants in the voice structure. So a formant is a kind of harmonic in a human voice and if you compare voices from the same family they have similar formant patterns so you have similar sound characteristics. It's really interesting matching those up and how they change over time as you get older.

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[...] any two things are connected by a third [...]

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Nothing here requires that the qualitative properties be instantiated in the actual world. In fact, nothing really requires that such properties exist even as universals or as categories. What matters is there seem to be such qualities, and we represent objects as having those qualities. (In philosophers’ language, we could represent the qualities de dicto rather than de re: that is, we could represent that objects have primitive qualities, even if there are no primitive qualities such that we represent objects as having them). In the words of Richard Hall (2007), experienced colors may be dummy properties, introduced to make the work of perception more straightforward. It is easy enough to come up with a computational system of color representation that works just this way, introducing a representational system that encodes qualities along an R-G axis, a B-Y axis, and a brightness axis. Because these axes are represented independently of other physical dimensions such as spatial dimensions, the corresponding qualities seem irreducible to physical qualities.

Something like this is plausibly at least part of the solution to the meta-problem of color. We represent primitive colors as a useful model of complex physical properties (such as reflectance properties) in our environment. Even if no such primitive colors are instantiated in our environment, the mere representation of apparently primitive properties suffices to explain their apparent irreducibility.

This idea can be extended to the meta-problem of consciousness by saying that introspection attributes primitive qualities to mental states for similar reasons. It needs to keep track of similarities and differences in mental states, but doing so directly would be inefficient, and it does not have access to underlying physical states. So it introduces a novel representational system that encodes mental states as having special qualities. Because these qualities are represented independently of other physical dimensions such as spatial dimensions, the corresponding qualities seem irreducible to physical properties.

This proposal works especially well on a view where phenomenal properties are (or seem to be) simple “qualia”. Such a view might have the resources for explaining why our problem intuitions differ from our intuitions about belief: sensory states are represented as simple qualities, while beliefs are represented as relations to complex contents (the cat is on the mat) that do not require a novel space of qualities. However, the qualia view is widely rejected these days, even as an account of how experiences seem to us introspectively. It is much more common to hold that experiences are (or seem to be) representational or relational states. For example, the experience of greenness does not involve a simple “green” quality, but instead seems to involve awareness of greenness, the color. Here greenness is the same quality already used to represent external objects in perceptual representations, and awareness is a mental relation, understood as some sort of representation (on a representationalist view) or some sort of perception (on a relational view). On a view like this, it is unclear how a novel space of primitive qualities attributed in introspection will enter the picture.

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If he meant answering the question of why there is something rather than nothing, then I think it is a silly question which obviously has no satisfactory answer if you convince yourself there is a sensible question there. For to “explain” existence you either cite something that exists or you don’t. If you do you have begged the question, and if you don’t then you haven’t provided an explanation. It’s a mug’s game.

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Heart on the floor when the telephone rings
All of the lies I just wanna believe
Drop all my morals, I just wanna sin

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If you want to look cool, start a band. If you want to make music, get a computer.

Ralph Lauren

The thing about a brand like Ralph Lauren is that it’s really a fully immersive world. There’s a Ralph Lauren polo, but also Ralph Lauren wallpaper and hand towels, his ranch and his car collection.

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I began to believe something he’d warned me about at the very beginning: that it can take years after completing a project to be able to speak about it coherently.

Jim Morrison, in 1969

I guess that one day the new generation’s music will be a synthesis of those two elements and some third thing. Maybe it will rely heavily on electronics—tapes? I can kind of envision one person surrounded by a lot of machines—tapes and electronic setups—singing or speaking and using machines.

Skrillex

The easiest trick I use is basically to make sure that whatever sample you’re using, it’s hitting at 200Hz. Look through a spectrum analyser and you’ll see a little ‘dunk’, and it should sound like that.

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If the simple feeling of the heart beating in our chest is somehow connected to our subconscious reactions to a person, how might the body’s myriad other processes be shaping our thinking?

@prawn_meat

let's get one thing clear. im not here to look at your jpgs. i'm not here to learn your username or understand your opinions. i'm here to read the time stamps of your tweets to make sure i'm progressing forwards in time

Psalm 103:12

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

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Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.

Techno

[...] formless yet repetitive cacophony [...]

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As you sit before your machine, can you breast the future and foresee the changes in your typing behavior?

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MAY 4 KENT 70

There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The Artist as Site-Seer

To talk constantly 'about seeing' is a linguistic problem not a visual problem. All abstract concepts are *blind,* because they do not refer back to anything that has already been seen. The 'visual' has its origin in the enigma of blind order — which is in a word, *language.*

Visemes

A viseme represents the position of the face and mouth when saying a word. It is the visual equivalent of a phoneme, which is the basic acoustic unit from which a word is formed. Visemes are the basic visual building blocks of speech.

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It’s not formal. It is a way of attempting to shape ephemera.

Suffering

Pain and suffering are not identical. Pain is not a species of suffering, nor is suffering a species of pain, nor are pain and suffering of a common (proximate) genus. Suffering cannot be defined as the perception of a pain's badness, nor can pain be defined as a suffered bodily sensation. Pain and suffering are categorically distinct: pain is a localised bodily episode, suffering is a non-localised affective attitude. Suffering can be expressed, pains cannot. As a consequence, we can have compassion for the suffering of others, not for their pains. The relation between pain and suffering is akin to the relation between danger and fear, injustice and indignation, wrongdoing and guilt: suffering is the correct reaction to pain.

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Issuing visas is an expression of a country's sovereignty.

Terramoto

"History": terramoto. A shuddering of earth and memory.

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Through the Ritual of the Holy Assumption, he built a world. It exists in a space separate from the world of our Lord. More accurately, it is within, yet without the Lord's world.

Unlike the world of our Lord, it is a world in extreme flux. Unexpected doors or walls, moving floors, odd creatures, a world only him can
control...

Anyone swallowed up by that world will live there for eternity, undying. They will haunt that realm as a spirit.

How can our Lord forgive such an abomination...?

(This part of the book is too damaged to read.)

...It is important to travel lightly in that world. He who carries too heavy
a burden will regret it...

(The book is too damaged to read any more.)

Dusty artifacts

Old works are borrowed, some I haven't seen for thirty years. Dusty artifacts. I cannot replace a missing screw without permission from the owner. The dust of language covers these works. Their identities give way to the balance of how this one looks against that in a given space. Interior decoration becomes the concern. Memory vanishes.

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He is an archetype of what Nelson Goodman calls worldmaker, creating a world from abstractions and techniques which cannot be possibly made by text, whether pulp literary or philosophical.

Brands

Brands are just tools for consumers to describe their personality.

Reza

I'm going to say this once: What is this pseudo-revolutionary millennial sentiment about philosophy and culture? Everything is now about emotions and affect. But have you considered this thought that your raw emotions might be actually pathological, assimilated by the very commodity culture you are trying to escape from, that maybe the best way is not to give your psychological feelings the ultimate free reign but to critically judge them? Read some stoics. The point is to judge which emotions are pathological and psychologically biased so as to differentiate the merely impulsively personal from those emotions which serve all the people who might actually differ from you? You talk excessively about your affects and emotions, but have you considered there are people who can't even pose such questions because they are still struggling with their mere survival in an obscene reality that knows nothing of their desires. What about their affect? The greatest cognitive sin is when we trump our privileges afford by the society in which we live in as if they were the laws of nature applicable to any person living in this vicious world.

Purpose

Outcomes aren't dictated for you.

Living Stories

There is a tiny fraction of artifacts (historic buildings, heirlooms) and living things (prized pets, zoo animals, human retirees recognized as human by working people) that are special atoms in the immaterial culture quadrant because they either cannot be made purely digital (ie put in a form where the material embodiment is of no interest, as in the case of living things) or because we have some sentimental attachment to the specific embodiment. These are artifacts that have become living stories.

Waste

Paper with words written on it is perhaps the archetypal material at the boundary between bits-first and atoms-first, as well as between resource and waste. The archetypal civilized act is making a single mark on a piece of blank paper with a pen. That simple act turns it from resource to waste, and from an atoms-first-artifact to a bits-first artifact.

Landauer's principle

Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment".

Physicality of Information

But we don't always pay attention to the physicality of information. Beyond a certain threshold of grokkable bits per atoms, we tend to start seeing a thing as being defined by its information content rather than the atoms that embody it. This is where a thing acquires an identity distinct from its material embodiment. Living things are the prototypical things with identities, but not the only things.

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A tub of white foundation powder,

Still flat and shiny on top.

A deep rose shade of grease blush,

For cheeks already chapped dark red.

A box of pink balsam leaves

Crushed in alum, for tinted nails,

Which many women in the restaurant displayed.

I-Li’s nails were bitten to the quick.

Cosmetics never used, jewelry never worn,

Mirrors never looked into. The outward gaze.

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From what unknown world does she distinguish me?

Crowdfunding

[...] but his ethical stance towards crowdfunding is that “If you’ve got money available to you as equity, you can’t just take people’s money for free”.

Lotteries

What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions

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Money is never an answer to the question, "why are you doing that?" It is code for "the reason is somewhere else." Sometimes, for a while, the reason is somewhere else for a good reason, but if it's always somewhere else, work will only ever be what you do for money, never part of who you are.

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I will find myself in an airport, for instance, and I’ll order an airport hamburger. It’s an insignificant thing, it’s a small thing, it’s a hamburger, but it’s not a good one. Suddenly, I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can last for days.

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On May 3, 1993. The computer program Deep blue did a strange move that Kasparov “concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence”, leading him to lose his capacity and lost the second game

That 44th move was allegedly a bug, A simple error mistaken for a sign of superior intelligence.

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Technically, so far as a common musical language is concerned. I can’t pick up a guitar and play what I want. Don’t know any chords. Which is part of why I feel so little ownership. I’ll have an idea, but what happens is usually different. It has also led to a sense of isolation, people asking me to play something specific for them or improvise with them, me not knowing how, or feeling embarrassed to explain that I don’t know how to repeat myself or speak the common language. At the one language I’ve developed, I am fluent. I’m just alone with it sometimes, and it doesn’t help with other life challenges, like dating or balancing a checkbook. I imagine it is something akin to getting really good at a video game, developing a skill that cannot be shared with other skill-sets. I’m an idiot in many other departments; remembering to eat, doing laundry, finishing sentences.

Organized Despair

artificial techniques … ritualistically practiced to simulate actual combat

This isn’t a platform.

A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.

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What's to touch?
What's to see?
We've seen it, we've seen it.
We've seen it.
What's to touch?
What's to see?
We've seen it, we've seen it.
We've seen it.
What's to touch?
What's to see?
What's to smell?
What's to feel?
What's to hear?
What's to taste?
What's to sense?
What's to make?
What's to touch?
What's to see?
What's to smell?
What's to feel?
What's to leave?
What's to take?
What's to count,
If you don't learn our names?

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He used a German word to describe how he felt about his own potential, Machtgefühl. Macht = power, Gefühl = feeling or sense. So, in broad translation, Machtgefühl: a feeling of or having a sense of power.

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it takes the truth and moves it in a different direction

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In HR, "culture" used to be anodyne conversations about scripting cosmetic gestures comprising mostly harmless signals. Now it is battle-planning in a weaponized environment of harassment and bias allegations, and endemic internal tribal conflict.

Normalcy Field

We are always in the grips of uncontrolled evolutionary change unfolding at a nauseating and volatile pace, but we manage to construct a "normalcy field" around our lives to help us create an illusion of stable equilibrium. But when the accumulated stress of unaccommodated change gets to be too much, the normalcy field collapses, and we experience this as anxiety-provoking "weirding" of normalcy.

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The plasticity of the organs is so great, that shades of vowel quality are endless, arising from infinitesimal differences in the relative positions of the lips and tongue. The number of possible varieties can as little be estimated as the number of possible shades of color.

Water

And I don’t wish to be number one anymore, I wish to be water. I wish to be closer to UNICEF or something where I can take the information that I have and help as many people as possible, not to just shove it into a brand.

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It looks poor but it’s very costly. It’s the opposite of what most people want, which is something that looks expensive but is cheap.

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Energy is Power : Correlated Energy is Information. (Technically, Energy is Power x Time. When comparing apples and oranges, it is important to express both in watt-hours.)

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geography is the strongest filter bubble

Gray Man

While it’s fun to make fun of the dynamics of virtue signaling on social media, a society where many people have ‘gray’ identities and belief systems is quietly primed for chaos. And chaos and disaster will most likely lead to a very regressive distribution of suffering.

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The idea that the thermodynamic arrow of time arose from a gigantic fluctuation leads to an amusing form of solipsism. From the standpoint of entropy, I, sitting at my keyboard typing these lines, am a pretty big fluctuation. A tree that I remember seeing is also a big fluctuation. It would be a smaller fluctuation, entropy-wise (recalling that entropy is extensive), not to have the tree, but to change my brain slightly and create the memory of that tree. Therefore, in terms of likely or unlikely fluctuations (and that's what entropy measures) it would be far more likely that the tree doesn't exist. You, reading this, should similarly doubt the existence of the writer.

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I see a wall. The wall is curved. The wall is rough. And the wall is red.

A cloud passes over and suddenly the wall appears to be flat. It appears to be smooth. And it appears to be violet.

Now, I can walk over to this wall and say to myself... Well... I can reconfirm that it's curved by walking along it. I can run my hands over it it and reconfirm to myself that, in fact, it was rough. But what do I do about violet? Is violet a mystification of some kind? Is it a lie? And if the cloud should go away and it becomes red... do I think to myself: 'Was it red all along?'

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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

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You start to gain what a friend of mine just described as "infrastructure fluency." This is in a way the opposite of architectural taste: an ability to experience the artificial world in its natural language.

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You've heard of analysis paralysis, right? I have a similar concept I call aesthetic paralysis: the desire for elegance in behavior limiting your agency. Superficial beauty is expensive in a rhizome.

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Commitment is not the absence of distractions, but the presence of stabilized focus. Focus is a positively defined condition, like "balance" on a bicycle, not merely insensitivity to things arbitrarily labeled "distraction."

oumuamua

“a messenger that reaches out from a distant past”

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To open a door is not the same [as building] a door.

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In the time of punk, and in my time, as well, garments were a way you transmitted information about yourself and your interests—what you cared about, what you believed in. Garments no longer need to have that performative function. All 16-year-old boys in Britain wear Palace. I’m obviously generalizing, but queer kids, skater kids, posh kids, poor kids—everyone wears Palace. How do you delineate the different groups of people wearing Palace? Clothing is no longer used in the same very simple, tribal way that I used it in my time. Now, it’s become much more complex in it’s role, so I actually think clothing has become more sophisticated.

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More and more, I judge brands or designers on their understanding of commerce as an ancient act. One of the reasons why Comme des Garçons is so extraordinary is because when I have a transaction with them, it feels like a really basic act. Do you see what I mean? There are so many brands who don’t understand or don’t have the feel for why humans are interacting in that way. Comme has it.

Nature

You either have art or you don’t, and that’s as close as humanity will ever get to nature. By nature I don’t mean trees per se but things that are complex beyond knowing.

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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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[...] the Christian tradition is rife with theological perspectives rooted in a transactional understanding of anger and forgiveness, justified by appeals to the anger of God or proverbial admonitions to be slow to anger, not rash.

Gray Man

There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure. I don’t have that as a concern, but there’s something appealingly “low-drag” about gray man theory: reduced friction with one’s environment.

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“All art now is collage,” she said to me, with reference not just to cutting and pasting but to the incorporation of methods and images with prior uses. “Heterogeneous in form,” she explained. “Against the different paradigm of the Gestalt object, like a Jackson Pollock painting—a single image that jolts you. Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts.”

Overpopulation

I think there is no such thing as starting from scratch. Everything re-begins, in a very crowded, overpopulated world. Even one body alone is pre-populated—by instincts, by inclinations, by teeming feelings and masses of memories, conscious and nonconscious, with all manner of shadings in between. The question is always “how”: how to move that crowding into a new constitution, the constitution of a becoming.

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Robert Irwin…once remarked, ‘See, what I’ve always liked about this town [Los Angeles], still do, is that it’s one of the least restrictive towns in the world. You can pretty much live any way you want to here. And part of that is because the place has no tradition and no history in that sense. It doesn’t have any image of itself, which is exactly its loss and its gain.'

A figure

I think that there is a figure in the picture, albeit an invisible one. It’s the viewer: you, or, in my case, me. I came to see that what I had taken for arch skepticism was strategic sincerity.

Mistakes

“When you make a mistake, see what’s good about it,” she said. “Mistakes are little windows into what is possible.”

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Is everyone in the world replaceable?

On Unread Books

Except that Bayard demonstrates how, when someone talks about a book he or she hasn’t read, even those who have read it don’t realize what he or she has said about it is wrong. Toward the end of his book, he admits he has introduced three false pieces of information in his summaries of The Name of the Rose, Graham Greene’s The Third Man, and David Lodge’s Changing Places. The amusing thing is that, when I read them, I immediately noticed the error regarding Graham Greene, was doubtful about David Lodge, but didn’t notice the error in my own book. This probably means that I didn’t read Bayard’s book properly, or alternatively, and both he and my readers would be entitled to suspect this, that I merely skimmed through it. But the most interesting thing is that Bayard has failed to notice that, in admitting his three intentional errors, he implicitly assumes that one way of reading is more correct than others, so that he carries out a meticulous study of the books he quotes in order to support his theory about not reading them. The contradiction is so apparent that it makes one wonder whether Bayard has actually read the book he’s written.

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The internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.

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[...] there is something about apologizing about one’s work that means it somehow impacted you. [...] What they’re apologizing for is that instinct we have to then, once we write, rejoin the world; rejoin the assignment; rejoin what the purpose was. Then you feel bad that you didn’t deliver on the purpose, but the real joy is that you didn’t deliver on the purpose.

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Something about series finales, it’s about ending, but ending with an opening.

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Before the snow algae vanish, though, and while there’s still some glacier left, it’s entirely possible that the last snow we’ll see on Earth will be pink or even red—a blush, a bruise, a rush of blood.

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Secrets are the very root of cool.

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Or just using the tempo knob as an instrument [laughs]!

Supertemps

We believe that in the years ahead supertemps will form new communities, augmented by social networks, to remedy these concerns.

Interns

Something that Rick Owens once said about interns, which is quite interesting, was why he doesn’t have them—he just wants to work with people that know their trade.

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There was a small panel bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, a fragment of linen, a small piece of bone, a folded parchment and some blackish-blue sand, all covered with a piece of linen cloth to protect them.

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The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

Beige

Looking past the display, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of it in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century, it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-ass institutional beige, unless they'd wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was folded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan. [...] She pointed at the beige hardware. 'How come this old shit is always that same color? His forehead creased. 'There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms. He smirked at Chevette. 'Yeah? What's two? 'That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally 'plain vanilla, you follow me?

Free will

We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth.

Big Data

Change the instruments, and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them.

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I think it is this new atmosphere of fear and that it won't change until we, as a public, learn to perform a new kind of alchemy and recognize fear when it is being presented. We need to learn to eat fear, to convert it into an energy that can be used to better a society rather than to terrorize and weaken it.

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The iPhone is your dream phone

Ashbery

Everything has a schedule if you can find out what it is.

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per speculum in aenigmate, literally: "in an enigma by means of a mirror"

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In the psychological fragments by Novalis and in that volume of Machen's autobiography called The London Adventure there is a similar hypothesis: that the outer world -- forms, temperatures, the moon -- is a language we humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish... It is also declared by De Quincey: 'Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that all have their corresponding keys -- have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.'

The Milky Way

The statement by St Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aegnimate would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, whichis the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament's abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived "in a mirror." We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die...If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.

YHWH

The name YHWH is a combination of the future, present, and past tense of the verb "howa" (Hebrew: הוה‎‎) meaning "to be" and translated literally means "The self-existent One". A further explanation of the name was given to Moses when YHWH stated Eheye Asher Eheye (Hebrew: אהיה אשר אהיה‎‎) "I will be that I will be", the name relates to God as God truly is, God's revealed essence, which transcends the universe.

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In the history of science, Laplace's demon was the first published articulation of causal or scientific determinism by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone (the Demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.

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If you adhere to the idea of the universal wave function or many-worlds interpretation, you could say that if you knew the exact wave function of the universe, knew the exact laws of physics and you allowed the computer to be outside our universe you could in fact simulate our universe and predict future and past.

The Order Flow

It's the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it. Stocks, bonds, gold, anything. If I understood him, that information exists, at any given moment, but there's no aggregator. It exists, constantly, but is unknowable. If someone were able to aggregate that, the market would cease to be real. [...] Why? [...] Because the market *is* the inability to aggregate the order flow at any given moment.

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Order flow trading has a very wide definition and it is not necessarily exclusive to other methods of trading. The cornerstone of order flow trading is anticipating the prices where other traders have pending orders set, particularly important market participants with very large orders.

Empathy

Sitting there alone, I suddenly felt happy for everyone around me, moved by the tenderness I knew was inside them. I was glad for what they could see, even if it was hidden from me. I think this gentle affection for not knowing might be what we really mean by empathy.

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It’s always horrible, time. If you’re convinced about something, you will manage it.

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For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universally beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things. It is for me a clear truth that one does not want to say something 'specific', it is then that one says what is most specific: the truth (which is of great universality)

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Traveling is one indignity after the next.

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What kind of a "reality" was this that allowed itself such abstraction as to demand that the world end at the edge of my canvas?

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[...] images that go beyond images themselves [...]

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In staging an experience, she seems to have recognized that there are certain things an artist might not necessarily have to do and that the work could be stronger for it, and she’s arrived at a place where that’s permissible.

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Angels Participate in the History of Salvation

Angels

The faith of the Church recognizes not only the existence of the angels, but certain distinctive characteristics of their nature. Their purely spiritual being implies first of all their non-materiality and their immortality. The angels have no "body" (even if, in particular circumstances, they reveal themselves under visible forms because of their mission for the good of people). Therefore they are not subject to the laws of corruptibility which are common to the material world.

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It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

Words

“Craft,” ways Woolf, applies to “making useful objects out of solid matter,” and it also stands as a synonym for “cajolery, cunning, deceit.” In either usage, the word mischaracterizes the act of writing. “Words,” Woolf says, echoing her contemporary Oscar Wilde, “never make anything that is useful.” She offers us many colorful examples to make the point, and argues also that words cannot be deceitful since “they are the truest” of all things and “seem to live forever.” These qualities of language, it’s uselessness and truthfulness, make the practice of writing as “craft” impossible, since writers do not work by “finding the right words and putting them in the right order," like one would build a house.

Words do not cooperate in neat and tidy ways. Indeed, “to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless,” says Woolf, “A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them.” Rather than thinking of words as raw material we assemble by rote, or as incantatory symbols in magical formulae, we should think of words as sentient entities who “like people to think and feel before they use them.” Words, says Woolf in her mellifluous voice, “are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious” and “highly democratic, too.”

Against modern conceptions of writing as a practical craft, in her time and ours, Woolf tells us that words “hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is in their nature to change.” At best, she suggests, we can change with them, but we cannot control them or shape and bend them to our ends.

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[...] and at once it struck me what quality went to form a [Person] of a Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when [someone] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason [...]

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[...] this sense that even the most well-intentioned humans are incapable of interpreting and acting on the messages coming from the gods, who neither think nor communicate as we do [...]

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Thermodynamics is a “phenomenal” science. That means that its variables range over macroscopic parameters such as temperature, pressure and volume. These are properties that hold at equilibrium, i.e., when the values of the macroscopic variables remain approximately stable. Whether the microphysics underlying these variables are motive atoms in the void or an imponderable fluid is largely irrelevant to this science. The developers of the theory both prided themselves on this fact and at the same time worried about it. Clausius, for instance, was one of the first to speculate that heat consisted solely of the motion of particles (without an ether), for it made the equivalence of heat with mechanical work less surprising. However, as was common, he kept his “ontological” beliefs separate from his official statement of the principles of thermodynamics because he didn’t wish to (in his words) “taint” the latter with the speculative character of the former.

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The past only exists in our memory, therefore in some sense we can't recall incorrectly.

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A metronome ticking at a rate of two or three times a second is perceived as an integral sequence, as a rhythm. When the ticks are less frequent, though, say at intervals of three seconds, the sounds appears to be no longer perceived as a sequence in the same way, and each sound impulse remains an isolated perceptual event. Similar results occur with slowed down speech or music: music or spoken sentences are only recognizable as such when their rhythmic patterns and phrases are presented at an optimal speed that allow them to be recognized as a perceptual unity.

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Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!

Skin

The philosopher, having no open truck with skin, leaps from essence to essence — from the essential knower to the essentially known. He leaps with never so much as the twitch of an eye-lash to mark that he glimpses anything of significance lying in between. Yet it is simple to show that skin — and indeed skin in its primitive anatomical character — dominates every position the philosopher occupies and every decision he makes.

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If I should ask you whether the nest of a bird constituted a part of the organism or a part of its environment, I presume that everyone present would resent the question as an insult to his intelligence. [...] The situation becomes somewhat less clear, perhaps, when we consider the calcareous tube of a marine annelid. Here is something which is definitely secreted by the epidermal cells of the organism, and which forms a sort of permanent integument. It does not, however, in this case retain any organic connection with the body of the worm. But when we pass to the shell of the mollusc we find that there is such an organic connection with the body, so that the animal cannot be dislodged without extensive injury to its living tissues. [...] Does such a shell belong to the organism or its environment?

Or are they us?

Let us ask, together with him, a series of simple questions, such as: what is our relationship to our clothes — is it to mere external objects forced upon us by tedious cultural traditions to cover our shameful nakedness? Or do we instead treat them as important parts of ourselves, so that we would rather prefer to have elegant looks in nice clothes, rather than a beautiful body dressed in rags? Or having accomplished something with our own hands and spent a lot of effort on it, pouring all of our skill and energy into it, what would we feel if we were to suddenly lose it? Will we be emotionless and calm, because, after all, nothing part of ourselves was lost? Or will we perhaps feel our very selves shrink and pale, as if a part of ourselves was lost or destroyed? Already these simple questions indicate that the extent of our material body does not coincide with our feelings of what we are as subjects, as selves, as psychic beings. Furthermore: what about our bodies — "are they simply ours, or are they us?"

Easter

The program disk is an unavoidable necessity as, if you use the current rules for calculating the date of Easter, a full cycle of Easter dates only repeats itself once every 5,700,000 years.

Pop

If something sounds like pop music it’s the sound of a genre being exasperated.

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You could literally never show your work to anyone. You could embrace chaos and illegibility, creating visual or written work that is non-instrumentalizable, but legible across many parts over a longer period of time. This might mean making work that operates at a different tempo than that of branding and social media, work that occupies multiple sites and forms, work that fights for the complexity of identity (as artist or otherwise) and form, and believes in a creaturely capacity for patience with a maximum dedication to understanding.

The Wall Itself

What I’ve done is say that actually, a better way of thinking about color is not as a property of objects, but as a property of interactions that perceivers have with objects. In my view, which is the view I call color adverbialism, there are perceptual processes that are going on all the time. Every time we look around a room, light’s bouncing off the walls into my eyes and my brain’s processing this information and I’m saying that that whole extended interaction between myself and my surroundings, that’s the thing that has color, not the objects that I see. So when I talk about what’s there in my surroundings, I say that color is my way of seeing those things, so I see that wall in a white way, so really the whiteness is modifying that perceptual experience. It’s more a property of the experience or that process, that activity I’m doing, rather than the wall itself.

FOAB

All that is alive merely evaporates.

Suffering

The unthought would have to make your machines uncomfortable, the uninscribed that remains to be inscribed would have to make their memory suffer. Do you see what I mean? Otherwise why would they ever start thinking? We need machines that suffer from the burden of their memory.

Equilibrium

Organisms are inherently far from thermodynamic equilibrium; to go to equilibrium is to die.

Substances

New substances cannot emerge. Only combinations or organizations are possible

Brown and Bitter

Our perception should be described in terms of adverbial modifications of the various verbs characteristic of perception, rather than in terms of objects to which our perceptual acts are directed. As I sip my drink, I see brownly and smell bitterly; I do not attend to brown and bitter objects, the inner analogues of the properties of the cheap coffee below my nose.

Black

But with Acronym later, and the size of production that we used to do, black was the only color that all of the suppliers would have on stock, and that you could order and expect to look sort of okay. That’s why everything is black.

Biography and Lists

There is no art of historical analysis; there is no art of biography. There is legend and antiquarian romance, but no real history. There are only annals, lists of rulers, chronicles of events.

Sublation

The fact that the smartphone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, ‘Fordist’ boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis. The characteristic affective tonality for the insomniac drift of cyberspace, in which there is always one more click to make, one more update to check, combines fascination with boredom. We are bored even as we are fascinated, and the limitless distraction allows us to evade confronting death – even as death is closing in on us.

Authority

Isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring?

Boring; Interesting

On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.

Silence

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

Romantic Originality

The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This idea is often called "romantic originality."

Hardly Human

Blue is the typical heavenly colour. The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human.

The List

The list, Gass tells us, is a basic literary gambit: "It occurs constantly, and only occasionally draws attention to itself." It is an essentially democratic mode, levelling its elements however disparate to a single plane or stratum, and laconically implying some absent linking verb: buy, invite, remember. Pursued at length, however, such modesty flips or flowers into syntactic extravagance – "The list is the fundamental rhetorical form for creating a sense of abundance, overflow, excess." In sum, lists tend to get out of hand.

Understanding

Understanding is compression! A theory as complicated as the data it explains is NO theory!

A matter dark indeed

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

Vision Chart

E FP TOZ LPED PECFD EDFCZP FELOPZD DEFPOTEC LEFODPCT FDPLTCEO PEZOLCFTD

Why

There is nothing more to say—except why. But since *why* is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in *how*.

What is a ghost?

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.

Natural Language

An alleged experiment carried out by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century saw young infants raised without human interaction in an attempt to determine if there was a natural language that they might demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God.

The Eye Assumes

The eye always assumes that it exists in a neutral color space. Therefore, you need to establish a correspondence between the neutral reference of the eye and a specific light temperature. One way to do this in an analog situation is to use identical fixtures and bulbs with an equivalent Kelvin value. You can then use this value as a standard against which to kick light in a specific direction—either warmer or cooler.

Sending this message was important to us

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

The moment when

Context collapse is the moment when one realises that ‘talking to everyone is the same as talking to no-one.’

Wax Impressions

Mind is still approached from within a substance and structure framework of background presuppositions. [...] Perceptual representations are construed, for example, as consisting of transduced encodings of the light in the retina, but this process of “transduction”, and how it could yield normative representations, is just as mysterious in this technologically updated version of wax impressions as it was in the original. The account, that is, is still caught in the strictly
factual, and cannot account for normativity.

Misspelling

Mispronunciation is known to be one of the most common causes of misspelling. Hence, phonetic misspelling is common, once a word is mispronounced; for example, the word "realize" may be misspelled as "relize".

Identity

Apparent identities such as “X” are composed of endless series of differences, where “X” = “the difference between x and x’”, and “x” = “the difference between…”, and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself.

Behavior

There is no behavior. When you get hit by lightning, who's behaving?

Divine handywork

“Making” is always a compromised, ambiguous affair.

Starmaking

We make a star as we make a constellation, by putting its parts together and marking off its boundaries. In short, we do not make stars as we make bricks; not all making is a matter of molding mud. The worldmaking mainly in question here is making not with hands but with minds, or rather with languages or other symbol systems. Yet when I say that worlds are made, I mean it literally [...].

Phonemes

Briefly, phonemic strings consist of phonemes, language-dependent speech units that characterize linguistically significant differences in the language; loosely, phonemes represent all the sounds needed to distinguish one word from another in a given language. On the other hand, phonetic strings consist of phones, speech units that characterize the manner (puff of air, click, vocalized, etc.) and place (front, middle, back, etc.) of articulation within the human vocal tract and are thus independent of language; phones represent realized distinctions in human speech production.

Meaning happens

I think it’s interesting, this moment where you evade meaning, or allow meaning to be more elusive. Then
maybe some meaning happens, but you don’t know what’s going to happen with it.

Language after Auschwitz

Celan said of language after Auschwitz that: Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.

Engrammatoi

[...] that among voices, some are articulate and capable of being written [engrammatoi], like ours. Others, such as the crackling of fire and the din of stone and wood, are inarticulate and cannot be written. Others still, such as imitations of irrational animals, like brekekeks and koi, are inarticulate and yet can be written; these voices are inarticulate, since we do not know what they mean, but they are engrammatoi, since they can be written.

A work

To open language up to 'materiality,' to make of it a 'work,' is 'immediately to make oneself a stranger to language.'

Tongues

"There are four tongues worthy of the world’s use", says the Talmud: “Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.” Other authorities have been no less decided in their judgment on what different languages are good for. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues, professed to speaking “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”

The book as time machine?

Yes. Mercury Station, my second book, explicitly explores that. I don’t want to get all sentimental about the loss of the book, but it’s a really great creator of history because once it’s published you can—I don’t know if that’s changing already—trust that it was published in this year or that. You can bring it to a lab, and they would say, “OK, this is ten years old,” or that this is an authentic artifact of a particular time. When you see a digital book or read something online, you know that any asshole could have changed any word yesterday. You have no idea what time it is. I’ve managed some blogs, and I’ve changed dates too. Venusia deals with a world where they’ve forgotten how to read and have no history; they’re completely manipulated. When someone happens to find a book of Venusian history, and learns how to read it, it creates a total revolution.

A minute longer than an hour

There was a fascinating bug in older versions of KVM on CentOS. Specifically, a KVM virtual machine had no awareness that it was not running on physical hardware. This meant that if the host OS put the VM into a suspended state, the virtualized system clock would retain the time that it had had when it was suspended. E.g. if the VM was suspended at 13:00 and then brought back to an active state two hours later (at 15:00), the system clock on the VM would still reflect a local time of 13:00. The result was that every time a KVM VM went idle, the host OS would put it into a suspended state and the VM’s system clock would start to drift away from reality, sometimes by a large margin depending on how long the VM had remained idle.

Qualities

The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths, but that is what it is. The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. The warmth of the summer air does not feel like the mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules, but that is what it is.

Abracadabra

Does anyone know where avada kedavra came from? It is an ancient spell in Aramaic, and it is the original of abracadabra, which means 'let the thing be destroyed.' Originally, it was used to cure illness and the 'thing' was the illness, but I decided to make it the 'thing' as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine.

Profane

In a profane age, the profane must be taken unawares and in their own tongue.

Fold

When we stare, barely seeing, into the screen, haven't we entered a "lost" body-dimension of abstract orientation not so terribly different from the one we go to when we roll up our eyes and find ourselves in the fold?

Books

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside of books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke amongst themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

Calendar

A calendar is a tool which cannot be justified by either logic or astronomy.

Pre-modernity

It is an intriguing and ineluctable paradox of globalized modernity that its approximation to universality remains fundamentally structured by ethnogeographical peculiarities of a distinctly pre-modern type. The world was not integrated by togetherness, but by a succession of particular powers, with their characteristic traits, legacies, and parochialisms. For better or for worse, these peculiar features have been deeply installed in the governing order of the world. Their signs should be meticulously conserved and studied rather than clumsily effaced, because they are critical clues to the real nature of fate.

Time

Time must never be thought of as pre-existing in any sense; it is a manufactured quantity.

Facing

Orientation seems to be to the East, in the direction of the rising sun, with the result that the terms kedem, saphon and negev became generalized with "facing", "left" and "right" side of anything.

Notoriety

Notoriety in post-Internet pop culture comes from either persistent productivity, or commitment to a level of visibility that generates interest—even in the absence of creative output.

What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The "man of God" is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality. There is no truth that is not war against theology, and even the word "truth" has been plastered by the spittle of priestcraft. It cannot be attachment to some alternative conviction that cuts here, but only relentless refusal of what has been told. The dangerous infidels bypass dialectics. It is the sceptic who assassinates the lie. Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? It is this thought alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth.

In the obscurity of the night

The earliest reference to a magnetic device used as a "direction finder" is in a Song Dynasty book dated to 1040-1044. Here there is a description of an iron "south-pointing fish" floating in a bowl of water, aligning itself to the south. The device is recommended as a means of orientation "in the obscurity of the night."

Directional precision in language (and gesture)

One complication to the simplicity of pointing may be the demand for directional accuracy. People in many different societies, speaking such languages as Warlpiri and GY in Aboriginal Australia, Austronesian languages like Malagasy, and American Indian languages like Wintu, and Tzeltal, are reported to keep careful track of cardinal directions, recorded in locational expressions in speech. The linguistic details vary, but frequently people use lexical roots for cardinal directions to describe things and events as points or vectors in the appropriate divisions of the horizontal plane.

Blindness

Blindness is a confinement, but it is also a liberation, a solitude propitious to invention, a key and an algebra.

Moral

A writer can conceive a fable without grasping its moral.

Primordial Blackmail

[...] workers are obliged to accept this primordial blackmail: work as much as possible or die.

DOM Space

DOM space is the set of all web pages that you can express in HTML

Knowledge

Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

Catherine of Sienna

When they realized they would not be able to smuggle the whole body past the guards in Rome, they took only her head, hidden in a paper bag. Unfortunately, they were stopped by the guards anyway. The thieves prayed to Catherine to protect them, and when the guards looked in the bag, they saw not the small withered head of the saint, but hundreds of rose petals.

Mystical Rose

The Virgin may suitably be called a blooming rose. Just as the gentle rose is placed among thorns, So this gentle Virgin was surrounded by sorrow.

Grids

Whatever their sources of information—whether Chevreul, or Charles Blanc, or Rood, Helmholtz, or even Goethe—painters had to confront a particular fact: the physiological screen through which light passes to the human brain is not transparent, like a window pane; it is, like a filter, involved in a set of specific distortions. For us, as human perceivers, there is an unbreachable gulf between "real" color and "seen" color. We may be able to measure the first; but we can only experience the second. And this is because, among other things, color is always involved in interaction-one color reading onto and affecting its neighbor. Even if we are only looking at a single color, there is still interaction, because the retinal excitation of the afterimage will superimpose on the first chromatic stimulus that of a second, which is its complementary. The whole issue of complementary colors, along with the whole edifice of color harmonics that painters constructed on its basis, was thus a matter of physiological optics.

An interesting feature of treatises written on physiological optics is that they were illustrated with grids. Because it was a matter of demonstrating the interaction of specific particles throughout a continuous field, that field was analyzed into the modular and repetitive structure of the grid. So for the artist who wished to enlarge his understanding of vision in the direction of science, the grid was there as a matrix of knowledge. By its very abstraction, the grid conveyed one of the basic laws of knowledge-the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the "real" world. Given all of this, it is not surprising that the grid-as an emblem of the infrastructure of vision-should become an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting, as Seurat, Signac, Cross, and Luce applied themselves to the lessons of physiological optics. Just as it is not surprising that the more they applied these lessons, the more "abstract" their art became, so that as the critic Felix Feneon observed of the work of Seurat, science began to yield its opposite, which is symbolism.

The Wall and The Books

The tenacious wall that in this moment, and in all moments, projects its system of shadows across lands I will not see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered that the most reverent of nations burn its past; it is likely that the idea itself touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows. (Its virtue can be in the opposition to building and destroying, on an enormous scale.) Generalizing the earlier matter, we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural “content.” This would be in agreement with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; as already Pater, in 1877, contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form. Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not happen, is, perhaps, the aesthetic act.

Names

There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light…. History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden.

A Tongue

[...] that language persists in the disappearance of its speaker, that the tongue remains, like the "blackened" surface of "white paper," to bear witness to the vanishing of that which it would seem to represent. [...] What we call a "language," one might conclude, is nothing other than that: a being which outlasts itself.

All language is combination

Saussure interprets classical poetry as an art of *combination*, whose developed structures are tributaries of simple elements, fundamentals which are required by the rules of the game to be both conserved and transformed. Only it happens that all language is combination, even without the intervention of an explicit intention to practice combination as art. Decipherers, whether they be cabalists or phoneticists, have a free range: a reading which is symbolic or numeric or systematically attentive to a partial aspect can always bring to light a latent depth, a hidden secret, a language within the language. And if there is no cipher? The constant attraction of the secret, of anticipated discovery, of steps astray in the labyrinth of exegesis—all these would remain.

Certainly facts

What we have been discussing are certainly facts, but within the total structure of the text these facts have been actively isolated. All other aspects are no less actively neglected. The margin between the choice which *isolates* a fact and that which *constructs* one is narrow. The objection raised here is not concerned with the arbitrary character of the question to which the text is subjected: all questions are arbitrary, and the "science" which seems most "objective" assumes at its source an observer's question or untrammeled curiosity.

Entoptic phonemes

Do we not have here a phenomenon analogous to the projection of an entoptic image, which we find on every object we look at? Are there not dispersed phonemes everywhere, available for arrangement in significant combinations?

THE HYPOGRAM

THE HYPOGRAM
or type of anagram to be recognized
in ancient literatures.
Its role in Latin poetry and prose.

Discourse

Language is only created with a view to discourse, but what separates discourse from language? What allows one to assert at a given moment that language has *become active as discourse?*

Various concepts are present in language (that is, clothed in linguistic form) such as *beef, lake, sky, red, sad, five, to split, to see*. At what moment, and by virtue of what operation, what interplay between them, what conditions, do these concepts form *discourse?*

*But what is language separated from discourse? Is language the basis of discourse, or is this basis to be found, rather, in some antecedent discourse? Language, the simple repertory of isolated concepts separated from discourse (words), is an abstraction.*

Techniques of the Observer

Blood flood your eye, fuck up your optics

Pre-Digital + Collection Digital + Space

Similarly to other color standards of the pre-digital era, such as RAL colour standard or British Standard 4800, the Federal Standard 595 is a color collection rather than color space.

Another scene

Another scene, not famous, not potent, requiring to be searched for.

Time

Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread.

Market Direction

Sideways bias up

Systems as need-satisfying

Round our needs—our weal or woe, Trains of thought luxuriant grow.

Ethical Truths

But in contemporary insurrections there is something that especially unsettles the revolutionaries: the insurrections no longer base themselves on political ideologies, but on *ethical truths*. Here we have two words that, to a modern sensibility, sound like an oxymoron when they’re brought together. Establishing what is true is the role of science, is it not?—science having nothing to do with the moral norms and other contingent values. For moderns, there is the World on one side, themselves on the other, and language to bridge the gulf. A truth, we were taught, is a solid point above the abyss—a statement that adequately *describes* the World. We’ve conveniently forgotten the slow apprenticeship during which we acquired together with language, a relationship with the world. Far from serving to describe the world, language helps us rather to *construct* a world. Ethical truths are thus not truths about the world, but truths on the basis of which we dwell therein. These are truths, affirmations, stated or not, that are felt but not proved. […] Truths are what *bind* us, to ourselves, to the world around us, and to each other. They give us entry into an immediately shared life, an undetached existence, regardless of the illusory walls of our Selves.

Cold / Hot

Paintings that look good when cold / Paintings that look good when hot

Flipism

Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!

Odds

Knew that we ventured on such dangerous seas; That if we wrought out life 'twas ten to one

Near / Far

Paintings that look good from afar / Paintings that look good up close

Robin Mackay

One can't completely determine what this entity was or is [...] I ask you to allow me the liberty to make something of it that I need now.

Countdown

His dreams were chaotic, but there was one constant: the ghostly countdown, suspended in midair. Even before he fell asleep, he had known he would dream of it. In his dreams, he attacked the countdown. Crazed, he tore at it, bit it, but every attempt failed to leave a mark. It continued to hang in the middle of his dream, steadily ticking away. Finally, just as the frustration became almost intolerable, he woke up. [...] Opening his eyes, he saw the ceiling, indistinct above him. The city lights outside the window cast a dim glow against it thougrough the curtains. But one thing did follow him from dream into reality: the countdown. It was still hovering before his eyes. The numbers were thin, but very bright with a burning, white glow.

Sarcasm

Sarcasm transforms the polarity of an apparently positive or negative utterance into its opposite.

Swimming

I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.

Alike

Blow east, blow west, he steers his course alike

Piet Hein

I’d like to know - what this whole show - is all about - before it’s out

A Question

What's different now?

Epistemology of Search

[...] the “epistemology of search,” where knowledge is produced by discovering and/or constructing meaningful patterns—formats—from vast reserves of raw data, [...]. Under these conditions, any quantum of data might lend itself to several, possibly contradictory, formats.

Not titled

correspondence of sizes

Not titled

dialectic of liberation and composition

Opacity

[...] The one-sidedness of opacity

Struggle

That’s the great struggle, for more access and more expressiveness, isn’t it?

Loose Ends

Well, last spring one of my [vacuum-formed] bomber jackets (2005) was bought by MoMA. That piece was supposed to be an iconic image, but then when it’s actually on the walls of MoMA—I don’t know, it’s a shock to feel that your odd loose ends are being tied up. All of the things that didn’t make sense start being named, you see that people behind the scenes have been stitching you into the fabric of your time. I’m not complaining, I was happy about it. But it felt uncomfortable too.

Hommes/Dames

A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. "Look," says the brother, "We're at Ladies!" "Imbecile!" replies his sister, "Can't you see we're at Gentlemen?".... For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries toward which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings.

Compass

Every single thing becomes a word / in a language that Someone or Something, night and day, / writes down in a never-ending scribble, / which is the history of the world, embracing / Rome, Carthage, you, me, everyone, / my life, which I do not understand, this anguish / of being enigma, accident, and puzzle, / and all the discordant languages of Babel. / Behind each name lies that which has no name. / Today I feel its nameless shadow tremble / in the blue clarity of the compass needle, / whose rule extends as far as the far seas, / something like a clock glimpsed in a dream / or a bird that stirs suddenly in its sleep.

J.L.B—Buenos Aires, October 31, 1960

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

Complete graph

A drawing of a complete graph, with its vertices placed on a regular polygon, is sometimes referred to as a mystic rose.

Nothing

and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing -
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires -
a face that does not want you to remember it.

Activity

As we reflect we become convinced that a vast number of actions are repeated, that the majority of our activities resemble each other, that the various new tasks we perform are new but to an insignificant degree, and that certain principles elaborated in the school of life lie at the foundation of activity as a whole.

Habit

The learning of every word in a language, of every fact, argues organised reaction, and every word or fact so acquired implies an established trend. From week to week, perhaps from hour to hour, we are building up and breaking down temporary habits. Let me transcribe from my note book: "A certain noise made by boots. I recognise the noise and the purpose; but there is nothing present except a sense of familiarity and such feelings as might go with verbal and other images. Then, as expceted—here again there is but a feeling—I feel a tap on my arm. Then a voice says, 'Are you ready?' I knew what was going to be asked of me, and so I at once quietly nod my head." Observe the total absence of verbal and other imagery. Essentially I react as I had reacted before. The creaking boots were familiar, so was the implication, so was the tapping, so was the short speech, and so was my nod. The noise of the boots was expected about about that time. The moment I heard the voice, I did not so much know what was coming as felt its purport. In this way we act according to innumerable habits more or less transitory, attention being reduced whenever a thing is thought, or said or done a second time. Thus the way I turn over the pages of a book is a distinct trend, the manner in which I open and shut the door, the fashion in which I read, and the like.

Words

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain

White language

The idea of colour, for example is like white light which perplicates in itself the genetic elements and relations of all the colours, but is actualised in the diverse colours with their respective spaces; or the Idea of sound, which is also like white noise. There is even a white society and a white language, the latter being that which contains in its virtuality all the phonemes and relations destined to be actualised in diverse languages and in the distinctive parts of a given language.

All the space possible

When we see colour, we observe at least a uniform surface environed by other surfaces, from which it is differentiated by its special characteristics. If we exclude these other surfaces, we stare into nothingness and all colour is gone, or, at best, there remains only a vague feeling. [Is that so?] Closed-eye vision, again, presents a changing multitude of dots, very like pricks on the skin; but even these dots are the result of a selective or complicated process. When this process does not take place, we have no volume and no dimensions left, but merely cutaneous feelings [Is this so?] A shapeless cloud, a gust of wind, a swarm of bees, an indifferent form like that of a rock, may be regarded as having volume; but a strange medley of dots, as in dim closed-eye vision, in no way resembles masses, volumes or lines. The undeveloped man, then, is blind, and lacks a colour sense and space sense, the former sense, like the latter, arising from development. By organised attempts the chaos is reduced to cosmos, and this is done by systematically developing visual systems, singling out in this way portions of the chaos and creating points, lines, surfaces and volumes. Space, strictly speaking, has no dimensions. We have only a complex of lines, or changes in the field of visual development or attention. By persistent changes that field becomes gradually exhausted, and with it the content of space. Hence space, as we know it, is all the space possible.

Residue

The difference between the scene on the South African veldt and the reproduced photographic snapshot which reflects it, is great; but far greater still is the difference between the picture and the view gained by the simple method of turning it upside-down. In the latter case, vision scarcely exists, and in a perfect instance of this nature, the residue would resemble a throbbing ache or a tingling feeling, rather than fully developed sight. We seem, therefore, to be face to face here with the _matter_ of vision, minus its subtle developments. If this be so, we have come to the parting of the ways where the sense of sight separates itself from, or unites with, its fellow senses.

Attention

But physical technique, Robbins pointed out, is merely a tool. “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”

The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins

“A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what I’m trying to affect is their minds, their moods, their perceptions,” he told me. “My goal isn’t to hurt them or to bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality.”

Agency

In other words, there is no self-sufficient agency that can qualify as intentional. There are varying degrees of choice at successive threshold states. The “will” to change or to stay the same is not an act of determination on the part of a unified subject in simple response to self-reflection or an internal impulse. It is a state of self-organized indeterminacy in response to complex causal constraints. It constitutes a real degree of freedom, but the choice belongs to the overall dissipative system with its plurality of selves. and not to the person: it is objectively cocaused at the crossroads of chance and determinacy. It is an objective illusion of the molar person to perceive the physical reality of free action as a metaphysical Freedom or "human right" exercised by a unified. self-directing, full causal agent.

Tools

VANSON motorcycle garments are designed to be worn on a motorcycle. They are tools. The fit is specific to the application. Though many of our motorcycle jackets are worn in urban markets as high fashion, it is their credibility as tools that makes them desirable as possessions.

Becoming resistance

Strata consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture

new things

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

Some architects can look at a building and tell you which version of autodesk was used to create it.

The last glass

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

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

the only good language is a dead language

spiritus ubi vult spirat

the spirit spreads wherever it wants

Feynman Method

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

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

Contre-jour

Contre-jour, French for 'against daylight', refers to photographs taken when the camera is pointing directly toward a source of light.

tf–idf

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

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

Gerund

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

I know its all been done before, I want to do it again. I want to do it again.

Thinking and Thought

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

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

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?

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

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

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

"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.

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

Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land-surveying and map-making, even of countries yet to come.

Points

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

…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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not content in the sense of meaning or subject matter, but rather information as distinct from its mode of presentation.

Prelinger Archives

As we wish to address the future the past also desires to address us.

It's a brassiere.

It's brand-new. Revolutionary uplift.

Smallest Uninteresting Number

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

(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

YOUR FREEDOM AND YOUR FLATNESS

Pseudomenon

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

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

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

A pack of wolves, a bunch of grapes, or a flock of pigeons are all examples of sets of things.

Alice DeeJay

Who Needs Guitars Anyway?

Drawn in Two Directions

Every imaginable line exemplifies every direction at once. A perpendicular line without breadth or depth is a monstrosity, and cannot be conceived.

Infrathin

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)

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

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

Difference is the contrary of equality

Movement / Brian Massumi

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

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

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

JJJJJ YR-MO-DA HH:MM:SS TT L H msADV UTC(NIST) OTM

Watching the Gaps

Watching the Gaps

Sculpture and Psychoanalysis - Judd's Badge - Tim Martin -

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

"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;

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

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

Border transfer - edge transfer

One thing after the other.

One thing after the other.

Cargo/Frontier

Cargo/Frontier

Default time/clock collection

Default time/clock collection

Demarcating Boundaries

There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers

Hyper-solid homage to the artifical (Artfice);

"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;

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;

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;

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;

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;

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;

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

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

"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";

"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;

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;

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.

Tron;

"Every one of us is in that computer somewhere, whether it's because of out drivers license, social security, or income tax. But the fact is that there is an alternate person that is an electrical person that is forming inside this electrical dimension. And then the question is, 'Are you in control of that information, or is somebody else in control of it?' When thinking about Tron, you sort of have to picture yourself inside a Pac-Man game. Picture yourself in there fighting for your own life, and the only way you can get out of that game is if you figure out how it works from the inside this time. The big difference is the game doesn't look the way it looks to you from this world as a little screen. This time it looks real. What happens in Tron is that the character that Jeff Bridges plays, a guy named Flynn, has invented these various video games, and they've been taken away from him illegally by a large computer company. In an effort to release the information from their computer files, he takes on their computer system. In so doing, he gets pulled into the computer. Once he's in the computer, he gets sentenced to die as a video game player by the Master Control Program. The irony is that those video games are his creation and now his life depends on overcoming his own creation."

Heat Death & Homogeneity (New Totalities)

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."

The three leitmotifs which the exhibition is exploring were introduced -

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'

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:

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:

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;

DNS Server becomes an island when a domain controller points to itself for the _msdcs.ForestDnsName domain

A clue to the multiplicity of directions:

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;

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;

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

"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

After-image

via r-echos / socialfiction

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.

Red on white. Tyo.

Abstraction / Simulation

"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 -

"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)."

Potential Titles

"Possible Center," "Possible Hole"

Diffusion Tensor Imaging

"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

"information exchange is the ONLY way to ever get real change."
Throbbing Gristle - Re/Search Magazine 1982

maximum entropy probability distribution

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

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

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

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

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+...

"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.

"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

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

"... 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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santorini eruption "changed the course of history." Point events

Reticular / Information

/"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

/"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

Rows of stars fill the emptiness - or, with their mute reiteration, create a nocturnal emptiness of their own.

from Entropy and the New Monuments

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

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

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.

Novelty

Terence McKenna's software plotting the fractals of "novelty" over many thousands of years of earth's history, up to 2012 C.E., at which point novelty will reach the state of infinite fulmination. He defines novelty, of course, as "the density of connectedness" or the "degree of complexity." The I Ching says that Time is a series of identifiable elements in flux. There are 64 of these "elements." He also believes that what we today call the I Ching is but a tiny fragment of a once immense device, now forever lost.

Pattern Recognition

The I Ching is based on a set of binary mathematical permutations, which also underlie what I call the "pure" progression of the Mayan number harmonics - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. As it is presented to us, however, the I Ching is actually comprised of the combination of eight symbols (trigrams) of three lines, either broken or unbroken, in all possible combinations with each other. By doubling the trigrams, the permutations yield 64 more complex symbolic possibilities of six lines each (hexagrams). By comparison, the zolk'in is based on permutations of thirteen numbers and twenty symbols or Sacred Signs which yield a possibility of 260 permutations. At minimum, each one of the 260 permutations is a combination of one of thirteen numbers, one of twenty signs, and one of four directional positions.

Finally, like the I Ching, the Tzolkin is a system for revealing information relating to a deeper or larger purpose. While the I Ching is precisely synchronized with the genetic code, the Tzolkin is synchronized with the galactic code. As the genetic code governs information concerning the operation of all levels of the life cycle, inclusive of all plant and animal forms, the galactic code governs information affecting the operations of the light cycle. The light cycle defines resonant frequency ranges of radiant energy, inclusive of electricity, heat, light and radio waves that inform the self-generative functions of all phenomena, organic or inorganic. The two codes are obviously interpenetrating and complementary.

The Synergetic Natural Number Continuum

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Anti-Entropy

Reich also designed a "cloudbuster" with which he said he could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. Based on experiments with the orgone accumulator, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature which was responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. During one drought-relief expedition to Arizona, he claimed to have observed UFOs, and speculated that orgone might be used for the propulsion of UFOs.

Contextual Color

Predecessor Patterns
. . . (none)
Problem Summary
When color is used arbitrarily and gratuitously information is obscured.

Crystal Language

‘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

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

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

Carl Sagan and The Edge of Forever

Entropy and Points

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

"The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

Henri Bergson - Homogeneous

Time is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness.

Sonic Fabric

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

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

"...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

"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

Knights of the Lambda Calculus: n.

A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the members know who they are...

Substratum

Architeuthis (Giant Squid)

Certain keywords: Laboratory, capture, vessels, sustain. Ocean plateau(s)

Progenitor star (star that exploded)

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

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;

double curvature
approach/transcend limit field.

IRC

Many-to-Many

Terraforming

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).

On a cinematic time machine

The action of the playback propels the viewer backwards and forwards through cinematic time. "The cinematic apparatus" is seen "as an agency to disrupt time." "Time is compressed or stopped inside the movie house, and this in turn provides the viewer with an entropic condition." (Smithson)
The action of the viewer moving in between the two screens is what orients them in their specific time as it telescopes inwards into fractions of a second. The viewer is found stuck in a (or series of) present(s). Their sense of temporal position is split as they control the movement of a mirrored image.
The condition of a perpetual present is more likely a relentless destruction of a point past it. By bringing the recent past into the context of a mirror, or present, and making it an actuality by giving a viewer agency over the timescale of their image, what is left is the presence of a latent anticipation; anticipation existent but not manifest. The future is never realized because it is a cycle of pasts becoming presents; an inescapable moment stretched out, superimposed onto the next. Time stops in between the screens as soon as you enter them.
The structural positioning of the screens and their relational time scales constructs a continuum of time. At the center the viewers movement stops all time and deactivates current experience in favor of possible experience. Moving to another end of the continuum propels them through the sort of anticipatory condition of the moment while the other end essentially catches them.
The screens become memory without content because they are nothing but past-ness emerging as present. In a way it gives the illusion of allowing one to construct their own temporal condition while actually removing any one prior.

Sourcing

Weather Pattern(s)

Amygdala

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

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.

Not titled

Gender star— "Symbolized optically it's a spectrum of many sexes, which in all directions shine."

Not titled

And God, the brunch, the brunch. The phone hauled out for every single pancake and every single Bloody Mary to be photographed and Instagrammed. That guy who strolls in and won’t remove his sunglasses as he holds up two fingers at my hostess without saying a word: He wants a table for two. The purebred lap dogs now passed off as service animals to calm the anxieties that might arise from eating eggs Benedict on a Sunday afternoon. I want the girl who called the first day of our mandated shut down to call back, in however many months when restaurants are allowed to reopen, so I can tell her with delight and sincerity: No. We are not open for brunch. There is no more brunch.

Not titled

Let us not be mistaken for luxury.