Irving Kenneth Zola, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control” (via badfuckingpuns)

All things in moderation, no? Even living. Gotta die sometime…

(via epistephilia)

Sometimes, by the time you’re an adult, you’ve already spent most of your life going in one direction only to find that it isn’t completely right.

I’m no astronaut. I have no proof for you yet, no way to say for sure that changing things abruptly at that point will end well. I’m not sure, it’s not easy, I’m anxious every day, and… we’ll see. All I can be certain of is that I don’t think I could live with the alternative — to keep being carried along by the current, not trying to change a thing.

Even though you may have “grown up”, it doesn’t mean you’re done  and you have to keep being whatever you decided when you were 5, 10, 15, 20 and knew nothing about life. Never mind the “adult” bit. Don’t let life push you into a being you don’t really want to be, just because of momentum up to this point. Don’t be afraid to screech to a halt and turn the f* around.

Steven Weinberg / Jeremy Bernstein

{ Book Review: Why Does the World Exist? - WSJ.com }

(via olena)

don’t we need to make up a point to carry on?

(via lunazigzag)

••••••

OS:
Not necessarily. After all, isn’t one of premises of Buddhism just that — pointlessness? (It seems so, from the Koans and interpretations of those Koans I’ve read.) They seem to carry on quite well, despite.

However… you could argue that pointlessness is in fact a kind of point.

It’s interesting that, either way, a human philosophy can mimic the System’s (Universe’s) “philosophy” — a system needs no reason for being, especially from a scientific perspective. It might be a far cry to suggest that Buddhist-like thinking — being sans need for a reason — means those people who practice, actively/consciously think of themselves as “systemic” (of the system). Yet it’s possible that the two modes of perception are intertwined.

P.S.
If anyone is reading this thinking I’m saying some garbage about Buddhism that’s absolutely untrue, please speak up. Message me, correct me. (Though, what I’m saying here is apart from the fact that there are other “points” to that practice; for example that a reason to live life kindly might come from the idea of reincarnation — the latter being a point.)

(via lunazigzag)

os…

Who is continually deciding that “Natural Philosopher” should no longer be a title — that a grasp on the way nature works has no place in the way that humans conduct their lives (and for what valid reason)? That science can say nothing about what only seems ephemeral to us, the way that air once seemed ephemeral?

Who is so convinced that, instead, technology will change us, our behaviors? So far, there are plenty of seemingly magical technologies out there, really amazing things that prior generations never thought possible — but they are tools. If we don’t introspect a bit, if we don’t ask questions like “Based on what we know, factually, about A, what does this mean about B?”, tools won’t do it for us. Our tools are more complex and shinier lately, but we’re using them to do the same damned things we’ve always done, if on a larger, more complex scale.

{ “The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” }
by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

via { somewhatclever }

••••••

Reblogging as text:
for search optimization & because that blue, compressed jpg was awful.

(via somewhatclever-er)

Aaron Freeman:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

Each one a Nemo in hir own right: the captain — and self-appointed, usually degree-less, mostly unqualified but mostly unpretentious and good willed (or maybe that’s only sometimes) naturalist, historian, archaeologist, scientist, collector, antiquarian or futurist or now-ist-maybe-buddhist, classifier, obsessive-compulsive magpie, or simply, in accordance with and out of [unconscious?] respect for ancestral careers, a hunter-gatherer — of a floating bubble with, imagine barnacles on a whale… now, make them float just off the whale, an inch! Imagine an entirely barnacle-inhabited sphere, imagine condensation displaced illusorily just an-arbitrary-distance-not-too-far from the ice-water glass as though its surface actually hung, unseen, just outside itself. Imagine a Dyson sphere and there you have it: each little submersible with a googol of artifacts about itself, trapped, orbiting.

And I among them: I gently place my satellites into bottles, folders, clouds, and label them. Where did it come from? What is it? Where is it going? Where does it belong: what class, family, genre, species, what else? These are mine and they make Me, although I did not make any of them. [Well, maybe ~10% are my regurgitations.] I seem to acquire a personality: a Who who has selected these — only this Who could have selected these in this way, only this Who could have woven such a web, as differentiable as the variable homes of individual spider species. I gently lace my Self into a cloud.

Some float entirely anonymous, some pseudonymous, armed with their orbiters and gazing out of the only, rectangular space left clear of debris, out of their submersibles, out into the Sea of Things. They project their Selves like Pepper’s Ghosts onto the outsides of those little rectangles so that each has a face. A façade. Some in swarms, some bobbing along alone, interacting via ripples sent between them: marine mammal calls? Tap, tap, tap, Roger, I acknowledge you!

And there! Where crest meets trough, a mating ritual! One performs the part of the male bird, waving all his stuff around. The other: tap, tap, tap, assumes female, and collects the flying accessories. The question becomes: Where have you been, what have you seen? That’s the basis for value judgement. You can tell if a being’s been around a bit by the state of that one’s personal-social curio cabinet. Are they cosmopolitan; do their choices reflect worldliness in a non-literal way: the way of subtle references and selections of rarities that only someone who’s been around the seas could make? Or are they still provincial, guided, like-like-liking all the safe, peddled, re-selected versions of things?

Each one in hir own little submarine, choosing choosing, outfitting a 2D, imaginary, coded, but very real Self with the Appendages of the Seas…

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

••••••

The first part is true — at least for me, with most things I do. Get them out quickly and maybe regret them a little, later, when I’ve wizened up.

But at least they’re out there… I attended a science-related talk last week and, at the end, one of the speakers’ suggestions (for young people who have graduated or will soon) was to { publish } their ideas, or else those thoughts/creations/etc. may as well be nonexistent. Especially now.

The second part, I’m afraid of.

(via wildcat2030)

Mark Norell, Chairman of the Department of Paleontology at AMNH.

during “Alpha: Where does it begin?”, Part 1 of a roundtable titled “The Alpha and the Omega: Beginning and Ending” at The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation—a division of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.

Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, 119-120

••••••

{ How do “yin” & “yang” conditions across levels of science produce life as we know it? }