May 2013
35 posts
5 tags
10 tags
“You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the...”
– Jonathan Franzen (via the-lone-pamphleteer)
••••••
But Jonathan Franzen is looking at love/like/etc. in very socio-culturally accepted ways. Accepted does not mean true, nor does it mean untrue. It means we have an “image” of what “love” should be — an idealization. The...
9 tags
14 tags
Reductionism vs Emergent Laws
3 tags
Don’t confuse practicality with importance.
5 tags
“What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment...”
– Erich Fromm – to have or to be? (via frrrst)
7 tags
4 tags
“Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage,...”
– Osho (via electrichoney)
10 tags
Biologists, Neuroscientists,
Hypothetically, what would you say to someone asking the “chicken or egg” question about neural chemistry: Does neurologocal/chemical/genetic information precede personality/responses/disposition or is it simply an expression of metaphysical “events”?
For example, those who believe in soul or karma and reincarnation, usually are more partial to the latter answer. For them, “chemistry” cannot...
3 tags
“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that...”
– Nikki Giovanni (via amandaonwriting)
Funny. It can be the same for art. I’ve had people tell me that I definitely made something because of something that was happening in my life at the time, despite the fact that they had barely any idea of who I was then, not to mention no knowledge about...
9 tags
Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland →
I’m concerned about this one. Kindle actually has a maximum of highlights one can make per book (I only found out while reading Infinite Jest, after highlighting pages at a time; probably to prevent copying) and I think I might reach it for this one. It’s really good.
9 tags
“Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously...”
– Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland
5 tags
Be Interested to Be Interesting
It’s funny when people say “you’re lucky you found something that you love doing.”
It reminds me of that thing Picasso supposedly said when some Parisian marveled at his 5-minute napkin drawing: “Sure it took 5 minutes… and forty years.” Quoted very loosely, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s a result of time and effort.
It’s also a strange thing to say (although I do understand what they...
2 tags
When dealing in “big ideas” of any kind, the hardest thing is often to keep excited, genuinely enthusiastic, about what it is you loved in the first place.
Because inevitably there come unanswerable questions and insatiable critics, and hurdles of all kinds besides that. And suddenly you realize you’re spending too much time talking about what it is you want to be doing, and talking about all...
11 tags
“It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by...”
– Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland
8 tags
“The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
8 tags
“Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
10 tags
“‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
4 tags
“… she always found it odd to see canvas used as the medium, a bit like...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
10 tags
“… they were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
6 tags
“Do you imagine they must have been fools? Do you think you would never make such...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
6 tags
“…they continued to grow — evidence of success. Mitalipov cancelled his...”
– Shoukhrat Mitalipov, reproductive biology specialist
Human Stem Cells Created by Cloning via Nature News
6 tags
“Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our...”
– Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology (via liberumarbitriumindifferentiae)
7 tags
““Natural vs Artificial”, “Man vs Nature” — those are real points of...”
– Olena, RE: Steve Fuller, “It’s Time for Humanity 2.0”
Quoting myself. (lol). Had forgotten about this. It’s good, it holds true, and it needs to become something.
10 tags
We can’t answer questions about ourselves the same way anymore — by just thinking about it philosophically, looking for some metaphysical reason.
Call it reductionist if you must, but it’s beautiful that even weekly we’re ever-closer to answering our deepest questions by looking into our biological, chemical — and deeper still — physical blueprints.
When wondering why we...
7 tags
“Since the beauty and importance of randomness has no real way of being monetized...”
– F RE: DrKick on Google Maps
••••••
Aside: This may be the only time in recent browsing history that I scrolled down to the comments, and left sans regret.
6 tags
“As a kid growing up in the Mississippi River valley I found the variety of...”
– DrKick on Google’s more personalized re-design of Maps
5 tags
“You exert more of your agency through an avatar when you design it yourself...”
– S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Penn State
Bonding with your virtual self may alter your actual perceptions By Matthew Swayne May 2, 2013
via Wildcat2030 on Scoop.it
4 tags
“I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I’m still, I’m still...”
– Miike Snow
10 tags
6 tags
dazegetbrighter:
what if rocks are actually soft but just tense up when we touch them?
••••••
I haven’t looked at my dash in a while; I love that this was at the top upon logging in.
It may just be somebody’s “silly” question, and yet it reminds me so much of the questions central to quantum physics — important questions about the most basic elements (that we know of...
2 tags
A: She likes Jane Austen?
B: She would.
A: I don't like those stories.
B: Stale
A: They don't reach beyond the species
B: They encourage recursive thinking
A: Mental patterns in the same loop
B: Man Woman Man Woman
ABAB: Not for me.
Instead, imagine living with the notion that you are little more than or as grand as dedicated memory. How funny.
C: Then, can't you reconfigure?
B: Says the AI. What do You know about living?
14 tags
“Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the...”
– 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
••••••
The unrealized plan KSR writes of above brings to mind Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
See also: Spaceship Earth.
••••••
Today in History: May 6, 1933:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating...
15 tags
4 tags
Islands of bacterial activity
Everything else has a restricted set of interactions with its immediate living space, chemical or atomic, depending how small you go… Small things ingesting and spitting out chemicals. It’s very direct and relatively easily observable; you can see what every one does, what their function is. Cogs in the system. Even the animals have a fairly regulated...
April 2013
33 posts
3 tags
Will I ever be friends with math?
I’ve always processed it in weird ways. I get distracted by things that others overlook, or are happy to simply memorize. I take round-about routes to a solution when something simpler will do. Why? Because it makes sense that way. I didn’t even think of the simpler idea.
When I was very young, I had this problem with addition (or was it...
6 tags
An Arborescent Calculus: Last night, I was... →
acalc:
Last night, I was watching a basketball game I could hardly see, after having scratched my right eye earlier; it was kind of blurry. But, at the same time, there was something interesting happening. I could still follow the action and who was doing what fairly well. The interesting part is that…
A great post. I love your description of sightless basketball.
It seems like I always...
5 tags
“I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun...”
– The Golden Man (Introduction) by Philip K. Dick (via lostinthesounds)
4 tags
5 tags
“The belief in the omnipresence of disorder is further enhanced by a reading of...”
– Irving Kenneth Zola, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control” (via badfuckingpuns)
All things in moderation, no? Even living. Gotta die sometime…
4 tags
5 tags
A Momentary Flow: Stephen Hawking: So Here's How... →
wildcat2030:
See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen Even some of the more faithful might have wondered over the last few days whether there truly is a God.
Famed physicist Stephen Hawking would like to help. Let’s imagine there isn’t, seems to be his preference.
Indeed, in a speech at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday night, he made jokes about...
5 tags
Ephemeral vacuum particles induce speed-of-light... →
New research shows that the speed of light may not be fixed after all, but rather fluctuates.
Interesting!
Questions:
Is it a big deal? If vacuum is not true emptiness but “filled with continuously appearing and disappearing particle pairs such as electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs” then doesn’t it make sense that the SOL would fluctuate when traveling through a...
4 tags
“We have entered a post-post-studio age, and find ourselves with a new studio...”
– The Transdisciplinary Studio: Amazon.co.uk: Alex Coles: Books (via iamdanw)
••••••
Like many things, true in theory.
The reality is that the title “Artist” is still most often met with the question “What do you paint?”
5 tags
“Mike Rogers, the intelligence committee chairman and a Republican …...”
– The Guardian House passes Cispa cybersecurity bill despite warnings from White House
4 tags
7 tags
“News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires...”
– News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian (via wildcat2030)
insta-gratification institutional manifestation #97646425789
(via epistephilia)
3 tags
No. →
Google Instant (& Auto-Complete) is like someone annoying standing over your shoulder and talking while you’re trying to think.
Did you mean this? Or this? How about this? Or this too?
No, Google. Shut up.
6 tags
9 tags
