Co tinuity i nt t e o ly t g we h ve be o e us.

Yes, it is all for laughs but the laughs have become hysterical laughs, very much related to hysteresis, or returning to a state we were almost in, and also to the hyster, the shape of the nemesis of man. It is no small wonder that this strange word finds its way into our vocabulary of illness that is based not on symptoms of the body, but of the mind, itself an abstraction (Is the body an abstraction? Think about it.)

Increasingly, I do not care, I do not like green eggs, Sam. Play it. Say it, don't spray it. Spray it with PAM, Sam, and cook your green eggs and ham.

Continuity isn't the only thing we have to worry about (Part 1)

Before and after is such a simplification of even linear data, that the idea of non-linearity drops on us like a ton of books, we who are conditioned to see things in terms of cause(before) and after(effect).

This is why stock market analysts and meteorologists can hold down jobs. It is so easy to fish data out of the air, that we are just now beginning to understand that linearity is even more of an illusion than continuity.

Indeed the idea of discontinuous everywhere at once space is exactly what makes quantum theory operate. And armed with this science, we are finally doing things our parents only dreamed about, pulling energy from nowhere, creating intelligence from carbon chains, and in essence, creating new life forms.

Where does this leave mankind? Devastatingly behind. We will only be able to keep up by morphing with machinery into something more. The Quantum concept is the Pandora's box of our generation, much as the printing press was to the 15th century and the photograph was to our grandparents'. To survive, we will have to embrace all that we are capable of becoming, because if we don't, someone on this planet will, and they will destroy those weaker than them.

There, now I've passed from confusion to paranoia. How many stages are left?

Continuity isn't the only thing to be concerned about (Part 1)

It is starting to become noticeable. There are periods of time when I seem to be across a continuum. The linear self is beginning to take a backseat to the personhood that is in several places, if only mentally, at one time.

This is not a lot of fun, either. It becomes difficult to keep track of things. The only recourse is to focus in on one thing for as long as I can, at the expense of everything else, because there is just too much else. When I stop and look up, I can see it all around me, the different levels on which things work, the different responsibilities, the different personalities I am capable of wearing.

If all of this seems abstract and hard to visualize, that's because it is. An example: I find that posts I have never made are in my memory on some level as having been made. So I make them. It's sort of the reverse of Alzheimer's. It's as if my short term memory is not functioning on one, but a thousand things at once, and they all get compacted together. What I had for supper last night is lost behind where my keys are and the ten things on my incomplete to do list, and my need to journal my latest observations on continuity:

My latest observations on continuity: It is an illusion. Continuity is an idea that takes infinity and compresses it into every place you look. To assume that finite man could operate on a continuum is gross hubris. We, humans, are painfully discretized beings, only capable of a thin version of continuity. Indeed, we are so impressed with infinity, which is just continuity at the end of things.

We don't think about the mind-numbing case of infinity everywhere and all between. We blank it out. Discrete infinity is child's play next to this, but we get the two confused.

Consider: an infinite lifespan is to us just somewhere out there past our 100+- years, 101 is just as infinite as 1*10exp1000000 if we die at 99.

But continuity implies that every moment is infinite. Yes, it sounds like a trick, but what I'm talking about is the mathematical presence of divisibility completed, throughout one unit and the next. And physically, we are just not capable of that. Even though we work on the nanoscale now, for true continuity, we can just go on breaking things down forever. That is true continuity.It is an asymptote around every corner.

Is this the path that Georg Cantor traveled on his way to madness?

On the development of an alternate personality

On the development of an alternate personality.

I leave this scrap to the winds, hoping that professionals will learn from my own experience.

I'm in the process of developing an alternate personality. It's not something that I have total control over, and in fact am trying to resist its attempts to surface.

However, its logic is compelling, attempting to justify itself in order that I might bodily and morally have some sort of escape clause built into consequences of any of my actions. The escape clause is 'mental illness'.

So, you can see it's contrived , yet it actually isn't because, as you see, I'm trying to resist it. I would compare this to the compulsion to shoot yourself in the foot to avoid military enlistment.

It's not something I really want to do, but here it comes again, saying how easy it would be to slip into dissociation in a serious way, thereby eliminating all responsibilities of life.

Now, I want to say that some days can be really bad, and some situations we find ourselves in can be trying, or bleak, or relentless. So this little voice, or not even a voice, but a word game being typed, shows up and starts typing suggestions to you. And you actually find yourself wanting to type it a reply.

Is this from loneliness? Oh, the phantom typist can come up with all sorts of reasons why it is present.

Anyway, professional head doctors, this is how it develops.

Do you know what a defense against it is? To assert that reality is NOT fluid, and other materialistic types of statements. But this is just a shadow defense, because to say that assertions can affect our minds is to say that in some fashion, reality IS fluid, and if it is, then there you are.

And all of this without drugs!

The Lost World - A Careful Attention

The president was on TV today. I didn't watch. It's all so boring nowadays. The real machine is in California, and it won't be stopped.

In a few years, the 1900's and the days before it will be lost to us. We are losing the ability to read and reason and especially to step outside of our own skin and imagine what is like to be in someone else's .

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. It's being replaced by something else, is all. The hive mind.

It won't be long before we are all connected by much more than just wireless communications. The day is upon us when our thoughts will be even more influenced than now by our peers.

Actually, this has happened before in civilization. We usually associate it with times of oppression, but really, the oppression is somewhat voluntarily accepted. There have been periods when individualism was celebrated, such as the Renaissance, and others when conformity was the only way to survive. But in most instances, those within the situation were unable to conceive of things being any different. Oh, we can judge other eras, but try judging your own. It's very difficult.

However, in the early 21st century A.D. , we have a unique opportunity to see our own world-view changing before our eyes. Technology is about to put us in more than constant touch with each other. Socialization is about to become the defining characteristic of society. (That sounds tautological, doesn't it.)

Many would argue, and many have, that this process has been continuous for decades, and in some sense they are right. But for many years, society has paid lip service to the concept of individual heroes, scientists, innovators, and celebrities. Never mind that many of these are manufactured by a mechanism of capitalism precisely for profit to the corporate world. It seems however, that our cynicism is about to give way to acceptance. Consider the rise of media-mob partnerships in choosing the next american idol, or the public awareness campaigns that have made cigarette smoking, global warming, and now avian flu into major evils in our society.

With the increase in available information (thanks to technology), the average human being is becoming gradually incapable of coping with life as an individual. George Orwell's groupthink is becoming a necessity for survival.

It is just a short step from this to the ridicule and eventual vilification of those who would dare go against the consensus. (Yes, Ayn Rand wrote about this 50 years ago. But her evaluation was itself appropriated and altered by the same capitalistic forces that she praised. Today her philosophy is equated with the mindless group materialism championed by the latest dysfunctional celebrity.)

Of course, the internet is both a cause and possible solution to this problem. The virtual frontier will become the shelter of the independent thinker, their bastion against the tide of group bohemianism that purports to know everything that is good for us. ( I believe this week it is hairball dissolvers).

For now the individual thinker is tolerated, though ridiculed. Eventually he or politically correct she will be looked upon with suspicion, and then discarded. The sad thing is that our own children will never miss us.

The world wants to do these things.

If you want to get published, just write a book on the following.

How to lose weight.
How to stop procrastinating
How to fall in love
How to write a book
How to be happy
How to get a tattoo
How to go on a road trip with no predetermined destination
How to drink more water
How to get married
How to travel the world
How to see the northern lights
How kiss in the rain
How to take more pictures
How learn spanish
How to save money

Sudoku Perception

There is an old saying, so old, that no one remembers it.

Which is my point: All of this information is here on the web right now. Most of it is unknown, unseen, the invisible web, but

that's just a metaphor for what is really invisible, which is the great mass of sensory information that we simply
miss. Lately I've been rather obsessed with this 'dark
information', because it is becoming more apparent to
me that it is key in understanding so much of what drives
and frustrates us.

This same paucity of true information exists in almost everything we're confronted with, simply because there is too much out there for analysis.

What this results in is literally a constructed reality. Witness the fossil record, a paltry handful of rocks that have been through a very selective process that can only hope to support the weight of theory that is in existence now.

In fact, you could characterize this phenomenon as a sociological process, similar to what Thomas Kuhn wrote about, in which a theory becomes more powerful than the data that support it.

True Power and Scientific Method Part 1.

Having just read the Wikipedia post on 'power', I thought I might explain something that most people miss.

Power is not limited to our influence on others, or even to others and our environment. Rather, power also encompasses our internal thoughts and the other worlds we might imagine we inhabit. Let me explain.

If one accepts the premise that the input from one's personal human perception is 'assembled' or 'constructed' into a view of reality, then it soon becomes apparent that we have more power over reality than it might first seem.

But because this premise is not universally accepted, and even may seem to have been disproven by the scientific method, we should first start there.

We can begin with the fact that our sense perceptions change as we age. A 60 year old will often be unable to hear frequencies that a younger person might have no trouble with. You might say that the 60 year old is handicapped, but what is really happening is simply that the 60 year old has a different set of perceptions to work with. Because a younger person may not be able to perceive things the older one might catch, such as mannerisms, tone of voice, and so on.

To take this further, another 60 year old may not be fluent in the same language, which means their perception will be quite different than another person of the same age.

It is easy to pass this distinction off as rare and unusual. My thesis is that it is much more pervasive than the average person realizes. Indeed, it can be the source of complete miscommunication, strife, wars, and other conflict. I'm not alone in this view. You can find information specialists that have a much better handle on this concept than me. What I want to point out is simply that it exists.

Since we obviously construct our world based on our abilities, emotions, and past experience, it may follow that the whole construction is too complex to dwell on. Perhaps we should just take our construction at face value.

Of course, this is what the vast majority of us do. It could even be said that all of us do this at least part of the time. Indeed, the scientific method is aimed not at confirming our world view, but at discovering inconsistencies in it and from these inconsistencies, expanding human knowledge.

To this end, we are constantly conceptualizing. We are taking our perceptions, rearranging them, constructing various categories and fashioning something we call 'reality' based upon a personal system that most likely follows a pattern of doing what worked before.

Now, there have been various methods of altering this construction that have been 'discovered' throughout history. The most prevalent today is, again, the scientific method. And that is well and good. The scientific method might be categorized as a method for developing reliable and repeatable constructions that can be shared among more than one person. It is this sharing that gives the method its power.

Like any method, however, it carries limitations. More on these later.

Ok, that was strange...

Just now, I did the last post twice, because the first time, when I posted it, it went to someone elses blog.

So I had to rewrite it, and left part of it for this post, since it was on a different subject, sort of.

The topic before was spending coherent time wisely, as opposed to the post into another person's blog, which I doubt has happened to many other people. I would regard that as a state of incoherent time, especially since I thought I was in this blog. What I finished the first version of that post up with was my comments on blogs. Since no one reads them, aren't they just an exercise in solipsism? (See my book.)

The upshot of it is that the blog becomes more of a seashell journal. It is out there for someone to pick up, but the likelihood is small. What turned me to this thought was my perusal of the hype behind The Secret', a movie and book that basically repeat Napoleon Hill's classic series starting with 'Think and Grow Rich'. What they have that Napoleon didn't have is a hype machine backing them up.

Because it's all popular for fifteen minutes or so, that will be the subject of another entry later. For now, the important thing is to realize that the hype takes on a life of its own. Or is the important part really that the hype is different from the actual concept. Or is the important thing that the hype is not the important thing, in fact, that hype is overused in this paragraph.

These and other rhetorical questions will be answered later, or maybe never.

What else is there to read?

As my time in this world (the one other people can understand) grows short, I'm trying to spend moments reading better things than the daily news. As a result, I've taken to finding authors on the Nobel Prize winning list, because, why should I waste my time on drivel. George Bernard Shaw famously said "90% of everything is trash".

So lately it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the book mentioned below, and now a book of short stories by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.

I've said this better before, so I won't say it again:

Luigi Pirandello

One, No one, and a Hundred Thousand.

This is a book by Luigi Pirandello. He won the nobel prize for literature. It is a book about how to go insane. Excellent, though obviously fiction. He left some things out, and put in some things that are made up. Still, it gives clues that are fairly accurate. One: start with your nose.

Borges liked him. Castaneda borrowed from him.

Book Review: Pounce by Ken Stern

Investment Strategy books have to remake themselves every few years, so there is no lack of publications for you to spend your investment profits on.

Ken Stern has written other books, but this one is interesting because it attempts to sell itself to today's chaotic market. The best you can say about Pounce is that it is timely. Just how do you make money in the stock market, now that it has lost half of its value?

.

Mr. Stern promises a rational approach, and spends time, a'la Black Swan Theory, explaining that we don't know what we think we know, and we invest our money stupidly.

However, his rational approach is so complex that only the most diligent readers will make it to the end of the book, where he finally outlines how to put his theories/tactics/strategies into action.

.

I picked up the book because I think its important to read what investors are reading. However, I don't think this book will make much of an impact (that is, adding to the already overabundance of 'proven' investment strategies) because of its convoluted exposition. Mr. Sterns utilizes a three pronged approach to investing, using market sentiment, economic and market trending, and valuation, combined with several named strategies designed for different situations and utilizing stock screening software. How's that for a straightforward approach? In various places he refers to his strategies as 'cocktails'. So much for objectivity.

However, that being said about the presentation, Mr. Stern is obviously knowlegeable about the market and forces that move it. From that standpoint, one can obtain insight. However, you will have to work hard to glean it from the book.

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Given that most of us have had a rough experience with our actual investments to date, regardless of strategy, who would have the resolve to put their faith in Mr. Stern's cocktails to insure the future of their retirement?

Mary Chapin Carpenter: Goodnight America

I usually find these things long after the fact. Mary Chapin Carpenter released Goodnight America on her CD 'Between Here and Gone' in 2004. It just made it to our main library this week. If you haven't heard it, check it out on Amazon, or get it on itunes.

Mary's voice is wonderful and she's not afraid to play a slow song slow all the way through. A critique, which I'm sure has been noted before: too many of the songs on this CD are in the same key.

But this isn't the CD. This is one song. You don't hear many like this, a song that pulls you out onto the road and into the world. Glen Campbell used to do it with Jim Webb's songs. Robert Pirsig did it with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And a few others. It's all too rare today, but maybe that's the way it should be. Shifts of the assemblage point can be precious, and should be guarded.

Illusion

The illusion of order basically comes from our orientation in time. To us, one thing follows another, and this makes linearity possible.

However, a few simple observations show this to be an illusion.

Finally, the idea of simultaneity was shown by Einstein to be a matter of reference systems. Thus we have science itself, a process of creating order, proving by its own rules that linear order is mostly a matter of choice or circumstance. This is why the camera was invented in the Nineteenth Century, so that the existence of the Camera Obscura could be invented by historians in the twentieth century to give a plausible linear explanation for the uncanny photographic art of Johannes Vermeer in the Seventeenth Century.

Fourth, as humans, we are continually reinventing our past.

First of all, and foremost, our body and brain receive multiple stimuli that are impossible to order in any kind of manner using a single rational system. This necessitates the function of the brain and memory in the creation of order.

An example that comes to mind is the fractal organization of the universe, something that seems obvious to us now only since Benoit Mandelbrot invented the concept sometime in the past. Before him, the chief system of order in use was the Cartesian/Newtonian linear order.

Even our common digital clock is a modern change from the circular order of time implied by the traditional western european clock face, with its divisions into twelve and sixty parts.

At first, it might seem that our Jungian archetype of order, our Castanedan cocoon is so overbearing and everpresent, that we might as well live within it. However, as the world is shrunken in size by technology, we would do well to note the relativism present before it is subsumed into a true global viewpoint.

Third, the observation that one third of our day is given up to a state of alternate consciousness would lead one to believe that something is going on when we sleep that transcends our need for physical rest. It is becoming apparent to psychologists that sleep is a time of orientation, or reorientation, for the body and brain.

This leads us to our second point, that other cultures process information differently from our own. Probably the greatest contribution that Castaneda gave us (he probably lifted it from someone else) is that when things don't fit into our system of order, they are left out and sent into the never never land of forgotten things.

Wolf Kahn Flattery

This is a painting by Artist Ken Elliot. Surprise! He studied under Wolf Kahn.

Rats in the Gutter

There is a running commentary in my head that seems to say "Someday, all the things you have experienced in your life will come together and have meaning, like a jacuzzi puzzle twisted around until it is solved without losing any steam, in a denial of entropy."

Or something like that. Salvador Dali tried to express this in his painting of the Railroad Station at Perpignan. Norton Mansefield expressed it with the non-publication of Putrid Pink. Marcel Duchamp gave up art, probably the most non-trivial yet weakest expression of anything.

The undercurrents about to surface this century are: symmetry, robots, scale, and falsifiability. You heard it here first, in the no-space of solipsistic internet infinity.

Sooner or later, I'll write a verse or two about this.

Reinventing Gravity

Physicist John Moffatt has a new book out called 'Reinventing Gravity. ' In it, he offers his take on the phenomena of dark matter and dark gravity. According to his theory, working with a variable quantity for the gravitational constant, both phenomena, which have not been observed, are no longer necessary.

Since I'm not a mathematician or physicist, what I found most interesting about the book was Moffat's approach to current assumptions in mainstream science, particularly regarding verifiability and paradigm shifts. His book fairly easy to read, and I haven't gotten to the chapters where he finally spells out his theory, but it appears that he is willing to let observed data have the last say. It will be interesting to see how it all falls out.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book so far is his exposition of the astronomical fascination with the planet Vulcan, a world that was theorized initially, with some authority and even logic, to explain the pertubrations in Mercury's orbit. Moffat likens Vulcan to current theoretization of dark matter.

It is interesting to see scientists grapple with some very fundamental problems in science theory these days. Moffat and Wilczek seem very willing to call things as they see them and not pull any punches.

My own feeling is that the current reliance on symmetry as a guide through today's research will turn out to be overused. It looks as if mathematics itself is in for an overhaul, because our current notation doesn't deal with the dimension of time very well. In simple equations, time is equivocated upon, and Moffat indirectly acknowledges this by refusing to take commutativity as an absolute property of some processes. Another absolute that hasn't been dealt with very well (in my opinion) is pi. This constant is an observed local phenomenon of our particular corner of the universe, and implies a flatness that could easily be violated elsewhere.

Finally, I think the concept of dimension needs to be taken even further than Mandelbrot has carried it, which physicists have implicitly done, but which hasn't made it into our explicit apprehension of the world. Scientists are still relying on Euclidean Geometry of three dimensions for interpretations and explanations of their math, when it is obvious that dimension is the wrong word for what they are calculating.

Dimension is too strongly associated with what we measure as length depth and width, which are entirely Euclidean and simply a construct that ignores other measurable continua in the Universe, such as heat, mass, and others which I might go into at a later date. If we replace the word 'dimension' with 'translation' or some other noun, then an order greater than three or four ('dimensions') becomes intuitively much less confusing.

No Subject

If gravity is an accelerative force related to mass, and mass affects gravitational waves, and gravity affects the dilation of time, which is the scissors, which is the paper, and which is the stone?

And if the speed of light is a limit relative to an observer considered stationary, then how fast are two beams going passing in the night?

Ikebana

Now I remember where I've seen work on the order of Sarah Sze.

The Man Who Heard Voices

Ok. I am fascinated by artists who wear their emotions on their sleeve, because, let's face it, I'm one of them.



This book is a play-by-play record of Night's creation of the movie "Lady in the Water". As such, it offers the best exposition of creative angst I've experienced since "Adaptation", a movie by Charlie Kaufman.



Every artist who struggles with creating should read this book. It's a reminder that no matter how hard you work, your message may just be too personal to attract a large audience.



After reading this book, I went out and watched "Lady" for the second time. Despite all the insights from the book, which certainly gave me an appreciation for the movie, it still didn't gel into an emotional whole. I tried really hard to "get it", and intellectually could do so, but my heart wasn't in the total picture.



As an artist, I realize that this may happen. It is one reasons why people disagree on aesthetic issues so often. Because art usually seeks a gut response, our guts often disagree. But one thing is sure: Night is a hard working craftsman who isn't afraid to make the kind of movie he wants to make.

My hat is off to those who try to live on the fickleness of the buying public. Night probably realizes that even the most sincere of us consumers don't always know what we like, and that it changes from day to day.



Despite that, he works his soul off to present his vision.

Grotne Nuke

Grotne nuke. Grotne Nike. Grotne go home on your bike.
Little boy crying at the bottom of the tree.
They won't come down and he
Is afraid of the tree.

He runs home to mama, who laughs to see such sport.
She dies, and the drug users come and take over Daddy's life.

Grotne home. Grotne Hume. Grotne bone and chicken loom.

Review: Kirby, King of Comics

I remember in the late 60's buying a friends Marvelmania mags and a lot of comics to add to my collection. The guy who did Marvelmania was Mark Evanier.

He also wrote this new book, Kirby, King of Comics.

This was a pretty good read, I read it cover to cover the first day. I found out that Mark was an assistant of Kirby's for awhile. There was also a lot about his creations and the work environment for a comic artist in the last 50 years.

To me, the book seemed rather negative, and maybe this was intentional. As I understand it, Kirby and many other comic artists got paid zilch and were treated badly by their publishers in terms of rights and contracts. What saved the day for Kirby, according to Mark Evanier, was his ability to do comics really fast, often several at a time, and his persistence in order to feed his family.

Stan Lee is also discussed, and the relationship between the two makes me recall the Lennon-McCartney creative process. Evidently the story depends on who you talk to. In this book, Stan comes off as somewhat of a bad guy, and I've never read anything else about the two, so judge for yourself.

Personally, I remember the comics and all the amazing art and brashness of the dialogue and storytelling, and I suppose I should look for some other book that celebrates that. Regardless of who did it, I enjoyed living in the Marvel Universe. Kirby's artwork inspired my own and that of countless others.

All that said, this book has some fine artwork in it, and you can tell that Evanier wrote it as a labor of love.

The Grid: Frank Wilczek and Physics

Here is a new book by Frank Wilczek, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for 2004.

If you ever wanted to ask your college physics professor a bunch of freshman level questions, I'm sure Mr. Wilczek would be the perfect one to have.

This man actually understands what he's talking about, more than I can say for many, many speakers on this topic. What is more, he is quick to tell you what he doesn't understand.

Finally non-mathematicians like me can get past the 'clouds of probability and a little more into symmetry and some of the history behind the math that we are too dense to understand.

Wilczek is not afraid to discuss the 21st century ether, which he has recharacterized and christened 'the grid', a space filling field through which photons, for one example are perpetuated. What is remarkable is the familiarity he brings to the topic of gluons and quarks, making them much more accessible as concepts to the rest of us.

I would rate this book as right up there with the 'Where Mathematics Comes From' for a current library of understandable commentary on Math and Physics.

This Unhistoric Day

On this day, before one of those days that will be written about, perhaps in history books, I thought it would be appropriate to write about something totally unrelated, as usual.

Did you know that 5 is 0% of 1024? That's how much of my storage space I'm using in this blog.

This is the lie that statistics brings you on your computer desktop.

It is a lie of scale. We live in an age when fractal scaling is all important to our survival, but it is ignored. The miracle of humans is that they can comprehend massive scale discrepancies, as between a universe and a pea.

But in a practical sense, we ignore it. For example, just how many organisms are living on your skin right now? We ignore this gracefully.

This is why, when the computer tells us that 5 is 0% of 1024, our brains flash WRONG. And then we go on with life. But, what are the implications?

If 5 is 0% of 1024, then what is 6?

Something tells me that this is the way the bacteria living on our skins, really want it. Scale, scale is the reality that is invisible to us. How many ppm of mercury is in the fish that you ate last week? Is it 0%?

This, on the day before we will be counting numbers and demanding perfect accuracy. It may mean the end of the world.

Critique of Pure Movie: Fireproof Religulous

Hollywood has finally gotten it. Rather than raise any stink about religion, their tactic is to avoid comment on religious message movies altogether.


Well, maybe not.






Religulous - Box office to date, 9 million, reviews 97.





Fireproof - Box office to date, 20 million, reviews - 17.










While religious message movies such as Fireproof and the anti-movie mockumentary Religulous are usually predictable, what is more interesting is the reaction of the movie critics. The ones that bothered to review Fireproof put it down for it's lack of production values. (It was produced on a budget of $500,000. Religulous, directed by one of my favorite Seinfeld veterans Larry Charles, was given the usual 'its another offensive movie that will make you think' reviews.

Neither of which get to the point that audiences are tired of the latter and hungry for the former. Audiences have never been impressed by production values when the message is trash. Only critics trying to make a living on it are.


Larry, don't you realize that the funniest parts of Seinfeld were exactly in the same vein of the comic parts of Fireproof? Maybe you could do something like this, if you 'got it'.

Kimmie Rhodes

Not long ago I heard a song called "Just Drove By" from a collection of Willie Nelson. This one was a duet, and sometimes, you know, you just hear a voice. There's Kiri Te Kanawa, Meryl Streep reading 'The Orchid Thief', and so on.

This voice went with the song. It was steeped in a special accent that spoke of poignancy, a life worth living, and somehow, an innocenct trust that everything would be alright.

It turned out that Kimmie Rhodes, whose voice it was, also wrote that song. It turns out that she has written and sung many of them. And they are just gems. I purchased one of her compilation albums, "Ten Summers", after much consideration. I'm eclectic, but picky. What I found out in Ten Summers was that rare album in which the songs are great right off the bat, and get better the more you listen to them.

There are tunes like Good Ol' Train, Maybe We'll Just Disappear, Windblown, I'm Not An Angel, and many more. Sometimes you hear country music and it seems hyped up and overproduced. These songs live up to the promise that their unassuming titles suggest.

If you read up on Kimmie, you'll find that she is living the life she sings about, out in Texas, now and then singing duets with the likes of Willie and Waylon, but always, it seems, singing her own song.

Do check up on her and give her a listen. She's a treat.

Rationality

My world of solipsism is crashing down around my head. Today I received an actual comment on my ramblings about probability, God, and my lovely nickel standing on its edge. The gist of the comment is that I should stray into rationality, certainly a well meaning and sincere suggestion.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-historicist/

Upon reading this anonymous comment, I immediately found the above site which had some wonderful comments on the historicism of rationality.

Because of the long history of rationality, logic, and the metaphysical basis of both, it is important to realize that these are constructs of human beings, much like the career of Hannah Montana.

In order to correctly discuss rationality, in other words, it is necessary for two or more humans to agree on definitions. It is precisely at the point of this agreement where problems begin.

For example, there is a nice article in Wikipedia about rationality, but a criticism of this article is that it does not cite any authoritative sources. This is a standard criticism found in scientific and scholarly writings. The article above, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is interesting because it references an important work (to me) by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I highly recommend this series of essays to any student of philosophy and science.

Again, Mr. Kuhn is not without his critics and criticisms, one of which is that his work promotes relativism (a philosophical term, not to be confused with relativity.) Kuhn defends himself in an appendix to his work.

I have no intention of trying to defend or explain any of this, only to say that it is fascinating to find so much disagreement on what many would say is logical and obvious. What Kuhn thoroughly points out, as do others, is that scientific research is full of examples of findings that were anything but obvious, and resulted in views that were fought over, sometimes for years, before any consensus was reached.

If scientific inquiry, possibly the most successful rational undertaking of humankind, is fraught with such disagreement in its development, what can we say of less rigourous categories of knowledge?

Even Mathematics, a field that is based upon logic and proof, is subject to the same disagreements found in the sciences. For an illuminating work that among other things, illustrates such disagreement in mathematics, see George Lakoff's collaboration, "Where Mathematics Comes From".

No doubt there is much to be gained from the rational pursuit of many fields of knowledge.

I thank the commentator for the anonymous comment, and hope that the above assures you that I have not taken rationality lightly. As for my own writings here being pseudointellectual and my having gotten probability wrong, you are probably right.

Inlepid

A word, though latin. From the back of my mind. Solipsism at work and play.

Corona Udder Butter

I got this one by doing research on Creomulsion. It's another glimmace, a true-typo.

It softens and relieves pain from sore teats and udders.

Google Hronir

This is beginning to get scary.

I did two random googles so far today. The first one was "my ocean has a hole in it"

It turns out there is a hole in the ocean.

Then I typed in "the universe is green". It turns out that this is true also.

Survival of the fittest theory

I love scientists who are honest. While philosophers like Nicholas Taleb warn us against the human propensity to create narrative from facts, Richard Dawkins and his cohorts shamelessly create 'evolutionary narratives' to explain everything from religion to breasts.

Thomas Kuhn, in his influential (it influenced me) book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" , explains the wealth of theory making in science:

When a field of study is in its early stages, there are many more questions than answers, and the experts turn to theorizing as a means of filling in the blanks. Eventually a paradigm will arise that matures to the point where it becomes dominant. This allows a great deal of focused work around the paradigm. Eventually anomalies are discovered, and competing theories arise. If one theory is better than others at explaining known observations, then it eventually becomes the new paradigm.

A key point of Kuhn's essay is his observation, from the historical standpoint, that defense of the current paradigm is intense, regardless of the science in question. Evolution, as such, has become such a dominant paradigm that it is commonplace to talk about things evolving, much as it was commonplace for decades to talk about things being 'relative'. In the case of both Evolution and Relativity, scientists look to the two paradigms for what they can predict and, some would say, for their utility. In other words, Relativity might predict black holes and possibly allow us to escape falling into one. Or, Relativity might help predict when a star might implode. Evolution might predict the extinction of a particular species that can't evolve.

What is important to realize, and what Kuhn observes, is that the prevalent paradigm of a science shapes research and experimentation. Evolutionary science has led to our concepts of extinction, biological mutation, and many other current fields of study. It could be argued that Evolution, as a paradigm, has provided humanity with the benefit of DNA research, research on the nature of diseases, and many other courses of study that benefit the human race.

When we examine the theory of evolution in this light, we can understand why so many scientists see it as a benefit. The fact that it conflicts with traditional Christian and other deist concepts of reality is seen as a side issue by many.

Intelligent discourse concerning the nature of these two apparently contradictory views might be more fruitful if it revolved around the fact that both exist. Both obviously offer benefits to humankind, and these benefits should be given appropriate respect in any discourse.

However, Kuhn argues, such intelligent discourse is most difficult precisely when two competing views are viable contenders for the allegiance of their audience. From Kuhn's point of view, what we call science will change to accomodate the facts that our technology provides us with.

So far we have said nothing about the benefit offered by view in a created world. Scientists are just now starting to look at this seriously. Most likely the fields of psychology and sociology will be greatly advanced by studying the phenomenon of human belief systems. Whether or not anything like a major social paradigm will arise, such as relativity, evolution, and digitization have been, remains to be seen.

Metaphysics of Probability

If you think about it, probability is a two edged sword. We already see this in our own existence, which is too highly unlikely to measure given our present lack of knowledge.

In simple limited coin flipping terms, there is always the chance that the coin will fall on its edge. (This actually happened to me once.)

Or that we will get 20 heads in a row.

What do we do in this case, when our Gaussian distribution is violated? We seek a way to get things back within our human sense of order.

And yet, the coin did land on its edge. Twenty heads in a row does come up. Books have been written on this, but right here I want to suggest that our concept of probability is such that the existence of God has plenty of room in between the numbers on the Gaussian curve.

In other words, God can easily slip us 20 heads whenever He wants, and we are free to ignore them as outliers, or to take them to the bank.

Sadness Twice

Two pieces of tragic stupidity this week. A teacher in London fills a car up with 13 people including mothers, infants and children as a stunt.

And, the Supreme Court outlaws the death penalty for a person convicted of the rape of a child.

These two acts, by supposedly rational, thinking adults, have the same roots as the actions of those we cast as mankind's lowest: the assumption that children don't matter. In my line of work, I see some of this every day, from supposedly normal adults from all walks of society, and I'm sick of it.

Ayn Rand wrote an essay once, called the Comprachicos, in which she compares the intellectual abuse of children by America's education system to the physical abuse of children by a group of subhuman people.

Although I think Rand was mistaken in her view of the nagual , she was on target thirty years ago with the hatred of life that results in outrageous actions against the child.

"Train your children up in the way they should go, and they shall not stray from it." That works in reverse, too. The very people that we put our trust in to make society a better place for our children are disregarding the effect of their actions on the very young who cannot speak for themselves.

Well, we could go on about philosophical and spiritual reasons why this happens, but I leave the Supreme Court of the United States, the ACLU, and the so-called teacher in London with this thought: What will you do when it happens to your child?

klempare

klempare - puzzled; at a loss.

Ven sel bachmoorten jidyah mel Borges, corrflink mer peklivaat. Per klempare sel cronicker Tlon.

Glimmace

Definition of glimmace:

A sensory experience that starts out as carrying one emotional impact but ends with the opposite impact. The effect of a glimmace is usually accidental and unintended. The taste of a sugar coated pill is one example.

A photograph of a beautiful woman that on second glance seems strained and harsh and ugly is another.

We tend to associate glimmaces with visual stimuli, such as abstract art, but examples exist in all of the senses.

The definition could be carried to verbal or literal ironies, but by keeping the focus on a sensate nature, the word succeeds in connoting a fleeting, unexpected change. Some optical illusions are borderline glimmaces, but creating a glimmace is never as strong as discovering one by accident. In some cases, poetry can succeed in creating a very sensual yet word-created glimmace.

Fast forward to 1995

Or 1986. Days of the Houston Tenneco Marathon. Running to the mall and back on Saturday mornings. There was no poetry, only thirty word essays.

There was no 9-11, we were still thinking about John Lennon getting shot. 2001 was a year in the future, and the Y2K problem wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye.

Time, as a problem, won't go away. It keeps moving, fluidly.

And the numbers are still in my head.

Hears a piece from much later, to be found in an upcoming book of poetry, Notes From Everywhere.

My backyard considers me
An intruder
An alien

Strange and shuddering

On its infinitesimal world of lumpy earth, a part
Of the whole world.

What if each of us was buried in our backyard? Would the land behave?

Gershwin's World

Ten years ago this came out. I guess that makes it timeless, because I heard it recently for the first time and it is as fresh as a Degas painting.



Expect the unexpected, because this album by Jazz Pianist Herbie Hancock isn't really about Gershwin or his world as it is about the genius of Herbie Hancock.



You will hear Stevie Wonder scatting to St. Louis Blues. You will hear the most magical piano playing above Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. Have I mentioned Gershwin? There is his second Prelude, but you might not recognize it unless you read the title, yet there it is. Sure, there are some recognizable Gershwin classics, like Summertime and Embraceable You. But get ready, this album is like nothing else I've heard in a long, long while.

2008 isn't going to be late.

In my ever ongoing attempt to give you no information at all, I've come up with some things to watch out for in the new year.

Paradigm changes - Soon there will be no personal computers (everything being done on cellular portable phone type instruments), and very little privacy, because there is no way to perfectly encrypt wireless communication. Watch for baroque texting, new privacy angst crimes, and the traditional media's continuing effort to consolidate.

Health issues. Euthanasia should hit the west around 2020, if not earlier. Get ready.

Ridiculous claims. People are taking these seriously now, so of course, they will increase, gain widespread attention, and then be dismissed, only to start again.

Loss of past. We will forget everything except the last 2 or three years, until some psychohistorical event triggers a new cycle in human thinking.

Last but not least - Robots. The west will fall hard for these sweethearts, because of its penchant for sentimentality and fads. Opportunists await.

The Emporium

The number 4. Is it really necessary?

See this movie and find out. Really sappy compared to other gosh bang movies out today. Plus it can't figure out what it is.

Who cares?

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

The overdue book

It's out there. Somewhere. That class you never attended. The overdue book from five years ago. Your clothes that you thought you had on. The job you thought you left, but no, you still are on the payroll and they wonder why you haven't been to the last 635 daily meetings.

Can we make these things happen? Is the line between dream and reality drawn in sand, or in dijon mustard?

There have been far too many instances of dream made into reality for it not to be possible. I still think back to the day I heard 'American Band' on the radio, three weeks before it was released.

Logical explanations in many cases are beside the point. Puzzles would not exist if logic were completely transparent. And why wouldn't it be transparent? That's not logical. Bertrand Russell already showed us that our current logical system is built upon self contradictory assumptions. The halting problem cannot be stopped.

I notice this post has been autosaved. In a short time, we will be hearing from a fringe group about the Autosavior. Your soul guaranteed not to be deleted. Be careful what you say about the infinite. You don't know what you're dealing with.

Are these the ravings of a paranoic or a stoic? How come the maps changed? Last night I looked at a map that had four different south poles marked on it. Turns out that the perturbation of the earth's rotation causes a procession, and there is no south pole, only a fuzzy boundary where the south pole may be at any moment.

If we think about it, quantum mechanics was just the beginning. The concept of the Dedekind cut shows us that angels can dance on the head of a pin, and that goes for something as big as the south pole as well. The butterfly effect would be more noteable if we realized that the butterflies are themselves not determinable.

Meanwhile, the book fines are mounting.

Infinity again and again

Salvador Dali was struck by the realization that the universe was converging on a railroad station in Perpignan. He was convinced that this confirmed his madness.



Georg Cantor suffered mental illness from the contemplation of infinity and the rendering of it in mathematical language.



There is a certain type of mysticism that equates the infinite with God. This is a part of human history and sociology going back to prehistory. Strangeley enough, we find actual taboos in modern mathematics, and not surprisingly, one of the most strict is division by zero to define infinity. The logical reason for this is that the operation is not determinant in the reverse: divide two by zero and get infinity. There is no way now to get back to two. You could just as easily get back to four, or four million googol. In a way, we can look at the division by zero as an abomination, a pseudomystical manifestation of the Devil aspiring to be the Godhead. I'm sure that Phillippe has notes on this somewhere.

Hronir

The details are in the devil. The order of wait not will underlie the arid. Space. Coriander the door opener from track of the place of time.

Borges can't be fixed.

I wanted to find this, but it hasn't been lost yet, as far as I know.

Maybe tomorrow.

Or yesterday, depending.

For one instant

For one incredible, indelible, fading instant,
She is an angel, a presence so perfect,
So untouchably beautiful,
That you forget to breathe.

No system of mankind,
No arrangment of words,
Can ever convey the thought,
The memory, of her in that instant,

A memory of presence,
Beauty,
Perfection,

A raindrop, a snowflake,
That changes to something else if you try to touch it.

The power
Of the moment of that presence,

Can bind you to her forever,
Can bend your life to intertwine with hers.

You live for that moment, and for all the moments that follow it,
Living them,
With her.

Remembering
That one incredible, eternal moment.

Sarah Sze

This is an excellent artist. I could live on a ceiling such as this.

The evil of dividing by zero

In an effort to add meaning to the world, it is my great pleasure to tell you that dividing by zero is now allowed.

(Go Here to see details.)

What's going on? Well, the fact is, you could always divide by zero, just like you could always take the square root of negative one, or subtract 99 from 2. As Tobias Dantzig writes in his monumental book, NUMBER, these two pedestrian operations were once taboo.

No, dear human, the trick is to decide what the operation 1/0 actually entails in terms of math rules. Once these rules are set down and integrated into current theory, division by zero will also become pedestrian.

If you stop and think about it, the majority of human knowledge is legitimized in the same way. There are countless books on the topic, but our point here is that the rules are subject to revision. We need to keep this in mind, both as a caution and an opportunity.

This is why we may someday find that animals are more intelligent than even the ASPCA thinks. If this should happen, books like Cat In the Hat may become Taboo, as unfairly distorting the character of animals. Bugs Bunny may be seen as a slight to the mentally ill, and I don't even want to get into the philosophical issues stirred up by Dr. Doolittle.

For example, Pluto recently became something other than a planet. But not too long ago, Pluto was the name of the God of the underworld, a name that was seldom uttered without fear and trepidation. Now he's just a not-so bright dog, which, again, means watch out for the ASPCA.

Division by Zero as an illegal operation is looked at with the contempt once reserved for cheap trinkets made in Japan, or in my area of the country, mullet. Just read some of the comments at the above link to get a feel for the mindless venom (rattlesnake and spider apology) that humans can spew at ideas. They are protecting their turf, the area of their minds where they were slapped into abandoning illegal math acts.

Will the internet shorten our acceptance time of new concepts?

I doubt it.

Who can't rant?

Parpol.

The limit of your ignoration is only your lack of imagination.

Welcome to World

There is no greater art than artlessness.

Why waste time expounding in a particular style when the wind is blowing unevenly across one ear and the other, creating a lonesome whispering? Isn't it better to close your eyes, turn your head, and just ponder what you might see when you open them?

You might be surprised.

Take the word "together". When I was six years old and learning to read, this was one word that wasn't in my vocabulary. I would read it in my simple primer, and mispronounce it "tog'- i - ther". My lovely memory is of my mother informing me that it was a word I already knew!

Did it matter to my reading? As I recall, it was wonderful to know what "tog' - i - ther" was, but it didn't slow down my reading. When Tom and Alice went to the store "tog' - i - ther", I just assumed it was a subtle agreement on something between them and didn't worry about it.

My sister, on the other hand wouldn't stand for this; she would want to hunt down this "tog' - i - ther" and expose it for the dirty secret it was. Never would she let Alice be victimized by her, my sister's, own ignorance.

Aren't we different?

By the way

I've decided that it's easier to come across as being feeble minded and sane, than as intelligent and insane.

What is required is a total lack of organization. This seems to have been acheived in these articles. Of course, we all want some organization, because otherwise, how do you find things?

So, maybe my solipsistic mind decorating project is really just the misbehavings of an idiot. But I do so want to be thought of as at least well-read.

If disorganization is the qualifier for our general Jungian archetype of stupidity, or at least feebleness and ineffectualness, then is a qualifier for intelligence a sort of super-organization? But that takes so much time.

Perhaps one way to achieve organization is just to throw everything in the air and then stack it up, then make a list in a simple textfile and use it to search upon. This is exactly how my phonelist works. Who needs things in alphabetical order when you can just search for the name?

Maybe, in fact, this would be a great way to store knowledge in general. Could a person make their own wiki this way? It would work for words, but how about for concepts? (Can you tell I'm making a self-conscious effort here to go off the subect?)

That reminds me of a movie I saw once...

HGTV at Cornell University

We really need to complain to the folks at Pietown about their unstated reliance on Joseph Cornell, who invented the style you see so well illustrated here.

They seem to have taken his sensibilities to heart on their low cost designer shows. Who wouldn't like to live in a room like this?

Thank you, Joseph.

Is time continuous?

If not, perhaps someone could slip in between now and then and mess things up. It's the pop science of the Matrix, isn't it? Ho hum.

Think again. The most interesting feature about discontinuous time is its non-linearity. If this moment is really not connected to the next, then jumps can occur. Certainly our consciousness isn't continuous, as anyone who has ever fallen asleep can tell you.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a song on the radio on summer vacation. Two weeks later the recording was released and I mentioned to someone that it was a great song, I had heard it before. They informed me it was brand new.

Are memories linear? Is the sky blue? It depends on what time you wake up.

There will be a price to pay, for all your playing around with centrifugal force.

There will be audiences to keep, and rolling thunder to bear upon the day of your safe arrival in Taos.

Inside of the heads of mankind is ripe confused mango meat. It is unpicked and it will be unkind.

Anyone who thinks this is not serious business will be very upset to find out that all their angst has been catalogued, for future generations to quail at.

Meanwhile...

Can one really understand mathematics by exploring the conceptual schemas that it hangs upon? In 'Where Mathematics Comes From' are some interesting, if presumptuous, arguments that at least put some mathematical concepts into an understandable framework.

Who hasn't struggled over the fact that 0.99999999... sometimes equals 1 and sometimes is less than 1? Who hasn't been confused about Transfinite numbers? Perhaps the author has done something more than just delineate these abstract objects into a conceptual framework. Maybe he has given us an invaluable tool to continue thinking about mathematics and eventually physics and science as conceptual constructs.

Is this any better?

Urgent Message

In the end of time, I will be a poolie.

Poem of the evening: I have to go to the store

I have to go to the store
To buy results off the shelf

Powdered charisma
And seasoned regrets

The cart is full now,
But one roller is stuck and
I keep going in circles.

Check me out, please
Let me away, back to the washed asphalt and my boiling cup holder.

The line stretches from the register back
To the frozen assets in dreams.

A child ahead of me teethes on emotions
While Mother skims the impulse rack.

Maybe tomorrow I won’t come back.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be buried up to my knees.

Expect the unexpected: A paradox - Part 1

Is there a large sinkhole in your future?

Let's talk about God today. The concept of God, speaking to the atheist hidden away in all of us, is a historical fact. In other words, large masses of people have professed to believe in an unseen higher power of some sort ever since recorded history began.

Even the most ardent atheist has to admit of this as historical fact.

A sincere atheist would examine this fact and have some account for its existence. There are several explanations. To my mind, the most interesting and certainly one of the most explicitly explored was Ayn Rand's view that was outlined in her philosophical works and novels. Rand sincerely wanted to refute the altruistic and mystical aspects of deism, and specifically Christianity.

For my part, having spoken with thousands of individuals about their belief in God or lack of it, what I see is that this personal decision is usually made on emotional grounds rooted in personal experiences. Once the decision is made, only then is it intellectually justified, if ever.

So, I take this as another fact: the decision to believe or not believe in a God is, for the majority of people, an emotional one.

Given these two facts, we find that a great many people in the world are making an emotional decision to believe in a God. This points to the possibility that humans have a strong emotional need to believe in a God. I think this is more than a possibility, I think it is an obvious truth.

I think the emotional basis of that decision is what makes it so much a source of strong interaction between people on both sides of the decision.

But what is even more interesting, if less fundamental, is the way humans take the simple belief or non-belief in a God, and abstract it into complex world-views. Thus we find a multitude of widely different religious systems as well as varying degrees of non-belief, which also have been incorporated into systems.

You can always tell when the decision on belief or disbelief in God is at the core of a world-view. The speaker allows emotion into their argument. This is most evident in scientific and political debate, where name calling and invective often pop up into conversation. I think this is because we emotionally sense that scientific method and unemotional scientific discourse are system-limited to discussion about subjects which are factually provable or disprovable, at least in theory. In other words, they are limited to subjects about which we can observe and verify findings, if not now, then in the foreseeble future.

The further away we get from observable verification, the more that a belief system gains relevance, and the more likely that emotionally based world-views will creep into our discourse. After all, man is a creature that inhabits a body teeming with chemical reactions and complexity. We are wired to have emotions. Which brings me to my final point.

Why are we wired to have emotions? What objective purpose might they serve? On a basic level, they are the source of our physical attraction to the opposite sex which serves to perpetuate our species. We have this in common with most other vertebrates, and can sense and find emotion in the behaviour of our pets, wild animals, etc.

I think that in the more developed species, emotion, or may we say chemical and hormonal processes, are the primary means by which an organism functions and makes life decisions. In fact, a point that was once taken as a universal truth was that the intellectual processing that the human brain accomplishes is a recent addition to our arsenal of life-defending tools.

If we can agree to this, we can perhaps agree that the thinking portion of our brain exists to help us survive in very special situations where our emotional apparatus is deficient. This is a very tricky statement to agree to. It implies that our emotional functioning still serves a useful purpose, which implies that our intellectual functioning is not a complete answer to our ultimate survival, but only an additional refinement to aid in survival.

It seems to me that any capable scientist could explore the above paragraph and devise verifiable experiments to determine more precisely how much our human function depends upon a combination of emotional and intellectual factors, or even if the two have any meaning apart from each other.

Thanks to the internet, we can easily find out if such experiments have been completed or are in process. I leave that to you and me, on our own time.

Waxing Metaphysical

There is a very real possibility that we have all been fooled. You can test this by eating a piece of cheddar cheese and a fresh strawberry at the same time. Very few people are brave enough to try this.

The Easy Key to Dreams

Reality bites. So stay away. Live to dream another day.

Avoid the Cajun Crab (flavored) Dip. Avoid lists of steps to take. Instead...

Rest your brain on the burnished aviary of the day. Reach for the poetry in the unkind cry of an angry crow. Instead of putting in your contacts, roll a grape between your fingers until it pops, and savor the skin.

Use verbs to help you. Mix and separate them from the petty adjectives that fawn upon the haughty nouns.

Beware the adverb, masquerading importantly.

Or...

Window shop at the cold spring beaches, imagining the silicon shore as fractured glass. Dip into the world-skimming salt sea and soak in centuries of water rime dust slime.

Walk in the street behind a school bus and bring yourself to the train depot before 1946 was a memory.

Fan yourself with a branch from a living, green tree, and listen to it speak to your soul.

.... Because you see, cleverness and playfulness and chair-walking aren't what make the rivers run. It is the seeking, seeking for open water, searching blindly but sincerely for the droplet ideas that sparkle on the surface of the mind.

[Unedited post from sleep journal 19]

We sometimes have to take things seriously, as when the icecaps are melting.

Where is the controversy in this? Is the melting of icecaps a fiction, and is the hole in the ozone layer a simple phrase in the newspaper?

If we assume the two phenomenon above actually exist, then we at least start from some sort of fact. The rest becomes curiouser and curiouser, as interpretations go wild.

Interpretation has a way of getting beyond the facts and burying them, whether we are talking about ecological data or the prices of stocks and bonds.

Really, when you think about it, we have so little to go on.

This tends to make extrapolation and interpretation the news of the day, rather than the facts, of which we have so many, that most of us go into overload. In come the talking heads to tell us what they think it means. The winning talking head is crowned the Expert until the next batch of data and the next crisis.

I was tickled a few weeks ago, when the stock market dropped and commentator Jim Cramer was called in the calm investors down. Can you imagine Jim calming anyone down?

But we stray from the real topic which is Unreality.

The March of Alex Wurman

How fitting to tell you about the composer of the music for March of the Penguins in the month of March.

Alex Wurman writes some extremely nice music. He is also capable of writing music that doesn't appeal to me, I have to add, but he gets paid for creating movie scores. So I guess the producers call the shots.

BUT, when he is in high form, such as the score for 13 Conversations About One Thing, or March of the Penguins, or others, you will hear some wonderful instrumentation. Mr. Wurman constantly is finding new ways to use the voices of musical instruments.

I strongly urge you to visit his website, www.alexwurman.com

Google Granker

Little Granker, all alone

Little Granker, like a tanker,

Fishing for a pony roan

Why are you so pity full?

When is cob a nob or bull?

Music Review: Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones

I was reading a magazine, thinking of a rock & roll song. The year was 1983. The song was the late great Johnny Ace, about a contemporary of Paul's, John Lennon, who was shot in New York City, three years before.

Cars are cars, all over the world.

Maybe I think too much.

If you want to write a love song, write a song about the moon.

Everybody loves a train in the distance. Everybody thinks its a train.

This is one of those, which, if you are lucky, you've never heard, except perhaps for the prophetic song, Allergies.

This is poetry, music, and things you think of all the time, rhyming with Simon and existing somewhere in the past, with Billy Joel and the Nylon Curtain, John Lennon's Rock&Roll, and Jethro Tull's Passion Play. All of them stretching out in musical waves, light years behind us, across the Universe.

The Oscars were on tonight

What an appropriate image for this ridiculous self-serving of Hollywood, offered up to us little people.

There are some really good movies being made. Once in awhile. Unfortunately, here they are presented by mediocre comedians in order to sell you your next prescription antihistamine. Tonight, skip it and go to the movies instead.

Or better yet, find something on Youtube to watch and support your local Googol.

Poem of the Night: Contrived You Find a Caress

Contrived you find a caress
In your dressing room,
Sad
It is only a bar of soap.

Slippery from the wet word go.
Fragrant as soap,
It is.

Terraces framed with wild roses
Not red, not yellow, not colorless.
See, how they tricked you with their
Beauty.
Somehow grown and manufactured both,
The beginning of sweet genetics.

Get behind the eyeball. See into the skin of the silken caress.
Belly up to the bar, now. Don’t flinch. Live on in sunken dreams.

Fantastic Four #93

I don't always identify with the Thing, but some days are just like this.

As a student of the mind, I find it fascinating to determine just who people identify with in this image. Today for me it is the Thing, but I am really focused on the individual with his thumb down in the background. Why is that person so against me, and who is he?

After all, the Gladiator is just doing his job. It's the onlookers that reveal the morbidity and the evil present in some humans.

To my mind, this is one of the greatest comic book covers ever printed. This is just awesome.

I don't care if no one is there, just don't answer if you're not.

This is one of those days that insane people have. Logic is suspended and emotion takes over. Sane people have these days too, but insane people deal with the stress of life by retreating into the unreal as much as possible.

What could be more unreal than a public online record that is invisible simply because no one ever looks at it? There is so much metaphysics and extentialism in the invisible blog, that I'm sure a thesis has been written on it, again that no one but the author and thesis committee have ever read.

This is why we have God, because He looks at our blogs and reads them, as well as the theses that we worked so hard on for so many months. In our sea of mediocrity, God swims around reading our unintelligible pangs and pains.

A few new concepts for Stephen Hawking to play around with.

I love conceit. It allows me to posit Stephen visiting this invisible site and stealing my ideas to create theories about the universe.

Stephen, let's talk about emergent behavior, because I really don't think you've thought it through as it relates to space and time. First, we need to realize that gravity and time are the same thing, basically. One goes with the other, and that's all there is to it. Once we realize this, then we can understand that emergent behavior impossibly depends on time and gravity, so these two cannot possibly themselves be emergent properties, as some theorists have suggested.

Emergence implies something being created out of something else. Really, the concept of emergence is a primitive placeholder for a transcendant property of existence that we as yet have no name for. Probably the closest thing to it is the quantum idea of Feynman that if anything can happen, it does happen. I would go further and say that it is happening, always happened.

Where we can learn something from this is in looking at things that seem not to be happening now, such as there only being nine planets, or is it eight. Science would have once said that the heavenly bodies we speak of always existed for humankind, we just didn't understand them, but that is simplistic, and not really worthy of a quantum physicist. It is much more sensible to posit the idea that we have both nine planets AND eight, and that human consciousness moves between the two realities with relative ease. The question is, how does human consciousness do it?

I think that physicists will soon be putting the answer to this together with the help of the neuroscientists. My view is that human consciousness (each of them, or only mine, if you accept the fact that I'm a solipsist) is a very minute physical black hole, where time and space are confounded together. It is the only explanation I have found that makes sense of the amazingly silly idea of consciousness.

Stephen, if you are still reading, I have to apologize for being both a madman AND a poet, which is the most tiresome kind of madman that can exist (excepting scientists). Somewhere back there I wrote a poem about the idea of a place. If you are extremely unfortunate, I may publish it here at some point. Or maybe I already have.

Cup holders make an appearance on the radar

A major path to insanity is solipsism. One of the best ways to acheive solipsism is to observe how your personal radar works.

Recently, the importance of cupholders hit my radar screen. Someone very important to me bought a car and one of the criteria on her list of must haves was a cupholder, because the one on her old car was broken.

Last night, the importance of cupholders was mentioned on a major network newscast, putting it ahead of wireless technology in designing a car.

Apparently, the importance of cupholders existed before it hit my radar. Looking at the internet, it appears that it made the scene as an issue in 2005.

However, solipsism admits of the possibility that the importance of cupholders was something I created myself, and since I also created the internet, (a concept once mistakenly attributed to solipsist Al Gore) my mind actively placed the references to cupholder importance into it.

Solipsism accounts for the fact that things approach my radar and then suddenly the whole world is talking about them. It is much simpler to posit solipsism than some Jungean theory of Universal Consciousness as accounting for my ability to hand pick the next big radar item.

The first phenomenon that I picked out was Billy Joel, in 1972, and then Stephen Sondheim back in 1975. Once I realized what was happening, it became a habit to search out unusual items to disprove solipsism. I've been mildly successful with Flim and the BB's , Erik Satie, and Wolf Kahn, but a total failure with the theory of dreams as deprogramming, the resurgence of figurative art, post-modernist art, Objectivism (who would have thought that Alan Greenspan would control the United States Economy for 30 years!), the universe being shaped like a fractal pinecone (instead of a simple ball), Google (I was using it as a homepage in 1996), Vermeer and his most famous model, Scarlett Johanssen, Seinfeld (my biggest failure), and Marvel Comics. I am currently testing Alex Wurman against the theory, as well as Booth Tarkington and hydrogen peroxide. Ultimately, I have a feeling that solipsism itself will become mainstream, which probably will coincide with the second coming of Christ.

You may wonder if I'm serious. Of coure I am, and I'm also completely cynical about it. This is my prerogative since I most likely invented Ayn Rand and Aristotle too, along with logic.

Does being a solipsist make me God? No, I don't think so. To me, God must be playing out some script or test with me, but my only recourse in this life is to believe in Him, because really, its either Him or Me.

If there really were people who would be reading this blog, and if there were some twenty year olds reading it (there won't be, either one, because I don't have room for them in the world) they would now be critiquing this post with Aristotle's good ol' logic and putting me off as a certified confused person.

That's just fine with me, as long as they don't discover Booth Tarkington, Ginastera, and the Bahamavention infomercial.

Meaning can be beauty.

Meaning can be unbeauty.

It is and isn't where you find it.

Here and now, then and there, no matter.

***************

Stretch out on the veranda of the day. Relax on the local crust. Unbind your mind.

The other thing

Turn down the noise in your life and let the wind enter your ears. You will find you can stop in time. Notions are fleeting, memory is a tool.

Opening the door and letting airsand flood the room.

An open comment to Edward Witten and Lee Smolin

Its good to see that physics is finally moving past the superstring era and into new territory based on experimentally verifiable theories. My expectation is that the absolute of Einstein - the speed of light in a vacuum - will be seen for the chimera that it is, as scientists come to understand that the so called absolute vacuum is itself a phantom that does not exist except in concept.

From what I have read, I believe that the math bears this out. Its just that physicists have this recent habit of going where the math leads them. Einstein himself approached theoretical physics from a conceptual standpoint, then developed the math to back up the conceptual theory, then counted on experiment to verify or falsify the results of the math.

Physicists today, at least the mainstream, seem to leave out the first step. This is not surprising; the first step requires genius and vision, which is always a scarce commodity. If we accept the experimentally verified theory that mass is a disruption of the Einsteinian field, and couple this with the phenomenon of dark mass, it becomes obvious that so called empty space is a highly distorted or lumpy field more like a bad batch of jello than like a smooth rubber sheet with marbles on it. If we then add the fractal nature of mass distribution (something that seems to be missing in the math that physicists use today) , it becomes clearer that the propogation of light should be quite variable on a local scale.

What seems to be the issue to be explored is possibly why light manages to travel in relatively coherent formations across large distances (that is, without being completely diffused in transit,) when apparently the presence of dark mass exists in its path. Most likely we are missing a distortion or process of diffusion taking place along the way that perhaps would explain the seemingly weak nature of Gravity, which is again itself a distortion of the Einstienian field.

It is good to see that scientists are becoming aware of the process of emergent order, but they have not yet incorporated Mandelbrot's theories of scaling (and distortions in that scaling process) into their toolbox of algorithms. Again, the route that physicists should explore in an effort to set complex equations up is to use fractal compression, in a sense, to make the math more tractable, perhaps even amenable to iterative solution using computers.

As a total amateur observer, I don't have enough background to know if this is already being done. No doubt, someone will eventually stumble upon this approach.

November 24, 2006.

E. Noidenoid

I just love this new E. Noideoid logo, that I created from BoingBoing, a self righteous snit of a site that hijacks its narrowminded little philosophy onto many otherwise bonafide postings from legitimate blogs.

For some reason the bloggers on this site feel they have moral superiority to anyone who disagrees with their supposedly amoral views. C'mon guys, either the world is fullofshit or it isn't, how about making up our minds for us. Last time I checked there were at least two sides to every issue, but you couldn't tell it from this bizarro-mirror image version of foxnews.

At least Drew Curtis's FARK.com, which also comments on its borrowings, doesn't take itself so seriously. Lighten up, folks.

Hallowalloween.

We live in the 21st Century, yet here is halloween. No wonder the kids are confused. Science, or emotion? Love, or logic? Ghosts, or ......... ?

Perhaps the computers will one day sort it out, when they are the only ones here.

As long as humans aren't omnipotent, some things will be unknown, and as long as we're left to contemplate on the unknown, we will create stories, some of them based on strange dreams.

They couldn't even get the spelling right. Its Googol.

Today was a medium charbroiled day. The on the back of my left heel it feels like a bandage is stuck there, only there is no bandage, none I can see or peel off. None I put there.

Still I feel it.

Underneath my left eyelid there is a singularity. I can stare into it when my eyes are closed and barely make out some things. They are just on the verge of being recognized, sort of like the garbled concepts you get in a dream, although in this case it's no dream.

Last Thursday when I was waking up, I stared into it too hard and almost couldn't wake up. I got out of bed and tried singing in the shower, but kept sinking into the singularity. Finally, after I put my contacts in, I was ok.

Now I don't look into it directly. Things stay a little vague in there.

On Monday the stock market will do one of its make up your mind jigjag things and go up and stay up all day. At least thats what it looked like in the singularity.

Poem of the momentum - Impromptu

Impromptu

Her mouth wouldn’t listen to his,
And so
He kissed her hair.

Stepped back,
Appalled,
She turned her eyes away
But not repulsed.

Her red burning face
Took the beat of her blood
And drained her heart.

He held her
She held back

Then he let go
And so did she

The gold, burning night, died the fire low, as morning whispered silently its light.

Jung and consciousness

Do we have a collective memory? I summoned up one of my favorite nonsense words, 'snitter' and this is what the search engines gave me. Evidently this is a snitter harvester.









I came up with another word, 'tring' , and it turns out that Tring is a town. I don't think I've ever been there, but did I see it on a map somewhere?

Can a madman make a difference?

How did our present society in the United States (technologically advanced, relatively rich, relatively secure)get to where it is? Did it just appear by magic? Are there certain pre-requisites that had to be undertaken before it reached this point?

I think these questions have been overlooked for a long time now. They are important ones to answer if we are to see our society postpone collapse that all societies eventually face.

If the question of causes is approached head on, much debate would be generated that could possibly be verified scientifically. It might serve as a normative framework for research that would ultimately be of benefit to humankind.

Someone other than a madman should take this project on and bring it to public awareness, before we destroy ourselves.

That is, if all of you actually exist.

Poem of the minute: Perfume

Perfume

Twirling maybe
Lights dimmed past visionary state

Sparks,
My rough hand extended
pulls you close and frightens me

Entwined in your attention
My breathing stops in time
With a pounding that makes my monkey blood
Thirsty for your laughing eyes.

My hand encircles your small wrist
I can’t remove it though you
Pull and turn and dance,

My arm up and down in time with your circled steps
The rest of me frozen afraid to turn
for a dream once vanished never will return.

Stay in my present always
Mystify my cares
Perfume my long lost fear with flight.


- Athens, 2003 erik_satie_rollerblading

Jose Luis Borges

You'd best be getting to know Borges. He is one of the best cataloguers of madness of the last century. Although he specialized in other fields than solipsism, I owe him a lot. His use of formalism to create fictions and other worlds was careful and well thought out.

The historical flavor of his work is invented, but genuine. The mystery and intrique of his life are reminiscent of Satie and Castaneda.

This next generation hasn't had a chance to inherit much of the richness of history, because the boomers pretty much internalized it for themselves. They will have to start from scratch. Borges is a good place to start.

His most famous story is the Aleph, but there are many many others to choose from. The Library of Babel is an excellent study in formalism, and Funes, the Memorius is very good.

Borges also wrote many stories about the Argentine Gauchos of the Nineteenth Century, to me bearing something similar to the subjects of Ernest Hemingway, if not the form.

There is a world of madness and un-uniformity in existence today, even the scientists are starting to explore it, sort of a continental abyss, like an unseen underwater cliff with an immense ocean of the unknown hidden below.

Phrases that stand out

The lost episodes of clever rational people will never be the same.

Dear creampuff, please arrive with your couch yesterday in the air.

I scraped the piano off my windshield and cleared the game.

Overt flower paths.

Drained word roulette.

Ordinary. Soliloquy.

I am the entertainer

Billy Joel, Entertainer Jim Cramer, Entertainer

I've seen both these guys in action, and they are the same guy. No one is fooling me this time.
He is really good in both venues, has a great voice and a really good knack for making investment understandable.

Who has been here?

I don't know what is going on. It shows here the last post was in January and it is here and now October. I didn't write the last post.

Whoever is messing with this blog, please stop it ! Some days it is the only record I have of what has happened the day before.

*******

Frank Black

Its Nineteen Ninety Four, and the Pixies are no more.

2006 is is the Twelfth Anniversary of this explempary album by the Bad Boy of the Nineties. There isn't much that has come along since to top it, so I thought I would tell you greenies what it is all about.

Its about the sound, the wild, free beat, and the phenomenal ripping through the twenty two songs, one after another that are ALL FANTASTIC.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the death of Crocodile Hunter Steve Erwin yesterday. And in another way, it parallels in an insane stringtastic way.

Websen

Theres something about websen

http://www.chaoskitty.com/webzen/archive.php?choice=74.01.08

Today's reason to go insane

It comes as a spotlight of insight. An emotional impact that burns between the eyes. And then, it is gone again.

Today it is the realization of why there is so much trash on TV, on the web, the radio, and all the other media:

Our civilization is facing a content crisis. There is so much media available, that it can't be filled up in real time. Hence the re-runs, the infomercials, the reality series, and the 24 hour shopping channel.

We are desperate for something new to watch and listen to, and the poor entertainers can't keep up. Oh, and did I mention that we're not willing to pay them for this service? This is why I'm sitting here at 11:00 pm watching Jerry Stiller's son and a grown up copy of Marcia Brady driving a car at night in between the ads for a new oldies cd. The movie is I think a remake of yet another old tv show called I Spy.

Thinking about what it takes just to type this stupid paragraph and then looking at the content on TV for example, makes me realize that there just isnt enough free talent to go around out there. I mean there is so much programming time to fill that it makes me go crazy just thinking about it. You can almost feel sorry for the actors and producers, because they cant make enough of this crap to fill up the airwaves and they are being pressured to produce it even faster, and oh, did we mention cheaper?

Is this latest attack of loathing and tremors a case of entertainment brownout?

Capacitors - poem of the month or so

Capacitors don’t think about what they do
So why should you?

Resistors never had sisters, never had to face a firing squad and die
So why should I?

And if I offer you a snake when you ask for bread,
Will you cut off my head?

I try and try to make my sneer as evil as possible.
But it is a faded evil, out of phase with the current trends.

Tomorrow I will have written about my anxiety attack.
For now, I just drip sweat into the sweet carpet.

Sudoku, a fad in action

What you do is just fill in the grid so that every column, row, and 3X3 square contains the numbers 1 through nine.
That being said, we can now explain that this puzzle, called Sudoku, has been around for a long time, but since its been popular in Japan, now its time has come here. It's showing up everywhere, in local newspapers, on the sidewalks, and it's a bonafide hit.

I started doing these during the hurricane in September last year, and have probably put in 200 hours of my life filling in these little squares. It was a great way to get my mind off of the devastation in my city, but maybe its time to move on.

If only I could lose a tournament somewhere.

Here are some of these puzzles to get you started.

A poem a day: Arrogant Bees

Arrogant Bees

Stinging my eyes and you laugh,
A sunset mourning for today’s flowers,

Tears caress, carelessly crying
Drowned, out by your cackling. Don’t stop
Remembering me. Render my fat, as you would make soap,
The kind that stings
Your eyes in the shower.

Hurricanes, Crisis, and Groupthink: An analysis

Here I am in Louisiana on the eve of Hurricane Rita's landfall somewhere between here and Texas. I was also here for Hurricane Katrina's landfall somewhere between Louisiana and Florida. You might say that I've an affinity for hurricanes. Rita in particular is showing humanity in some fascinating colors.

100 miles of cars backed up between Galveston and Dallas, Texas. Helpful comment by Weather Channel announcer: Maybe they could get some buses in there to help get people off the highway. Question: How would you get the buses in and out, with helicopters?

The bus concept is an example of groupthink: the problem with Katrina devastating New Orleans was not enough buses to cart those poor unfortunate people out of the city. So: in any hurricane, you need lots of buses to help those in crisis. WRONG!

Groupthink is often, but not always wrong. The media is particularly subject to groupthink, because so many announcers are of average intelligence. They think like the next person, which is to say, superficially.

Another example: We've learned from Hurricane Katrina exactly how serious a hurricane can be and there are steps to take which will make everything orderly. WRONG!

Hurricanes are unpredictable. With Katrina and now Rita, as with so many hurricanes, you have no idea exactly where it will end up, ESPECIALLY when you need to be making decisions. As a result, people are going to follow groupthink: they will evacuate when they see EVERYONE ELSE evacuating, and NOT BEFORE. We drove over to Baton Rouge from the west early in the morning on Thursday. It was sunny and a regular day, except for a few Texans in a hurry. By the afternoon, the interstate was at a standstill, as we watched from a Baton Rouge apartment.

How do you escape groupthink? If only doing the opposite would work, but that won't work. The only possible way out of groupthink is to gather data diligently and then make very conservative choices. Look beyond the emotional sources of news like the network and weather channels. After all, they are entertainers, not newscasters. They are selling cars and trucks and exercise equipment. Sad but increasingly true. The internet, if used in a very broad sweep, can yield useful information. Constantly separate fact from opinion, rumor from reality, and ALWAYS be on the lookout for individuals with insights and other individuals who are stupidly transmitting false information.

For example, boingboing.net sends us the blog of Kathryn Cramer, who notes that the intensity of Rita seems to be changing in correlation to the depth of the basin of the Gulf of Mexico. This very interesting observation bears notice, however it is most likely that 1) it will be noticed by the media who will turn it into a pseudo-theory or 2) it will go completely ignored. What almost certainly WON'T happen is 3) it will be noticed by weather scientists and tested as a possible factor (among many) in determining the behavior of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Groupthink will continue to blind humankind to real observation, resulting in more emotional turf-war confrontations and yammering. Meanwhile my friends in New Orleans are hours of the same loop footage of their homes being re-flooded while the rest of us yearn for real information to come across our television sets.

Pretending the world outside exists

The physical nature of a book is such that it can become a power object for a Castanedan. But more often it is the obsession possession of a fool.

The physical nature of reality is misleading; human creatures are not creatures of reality, but of being. What is the difference?

Imagine a pain in the ball of your foot. You are certain it has a real, physical cause, because you feel physical pain.

But, you have it MRI'd and find out there is no cause in the foot. Now, you could argue that there is a damaged nerve ending or a busted synapse somewhere in between the foot and your brain, or even that the chemicals in the brain itself are out of balance. But you feel it in your foot! That alone is enough to demonstrate the mistake of your perception.

If we can become mistaken about something as basic and personal as a feeling of pain, what of things we see? It is the old philosophical problem of induction. We assume the sun is up when the alarm goes off, because it was up yesterday when the alarm went off. Better check.

Maggots, Murder, and Men : Book Review

Every once in awhile I come across a book that introduces old topics in a completely new way. We all know about bugs, and we all have seen murder mysteries. Combine the two, mix in a strong dash of British ambience, and you get something completely novel and different:

Maggots, Murderm and Men(2002) is a non-fiction book written by a British Forensic Entymologist, Dr. Zakaria Erzincllioglu(!) Dr. Zak comes across as a combination of Nero Wolfe, Sherlock Holmes, and the Orkin Man.

The writing is wonderfully English in tone, and the content consists of countless stories and anecdotes about the author's experience in using insect knowledge to help solve murders and other crimes.

Grossout warning: You need a strong stomach to read this stuff. Dr. Zak cheerfully discusses the laying of flies eggs on rotting human flesh and the resulting growth of maggots and bluebottle flies. However, the book manages to be engaging and a refreshing alternative to the plethora of murder novels that seem to be so popular now.

Orchids and Baseball

Excerpt from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean:

"Do you know where these neoregelias[Bromeliad Specie] came from? ... One day he found a little mysterious seedling on an orchid he'd gotten. He stuck the seedling in a hollowed-out coconut shell and grew it up, and it was this good-looking bromeliad. He set up his own little nursery and sold nothing but pups from that bromeliad. He must have made fifty thousand dollars on it. He lived off that one plant for years. "

The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book about the Orchid and tropical plant industry in south Florida. As such it is a record of the investigations of writer Susan Orlean. But it is actually a collection of stories, which have taken on the character of local myths.

There is a line between reality and non-reality, and part of that line is myth and story. Stories sit on the interface between now and the past and future, with our senses and intuition as individual gatekeepers of what is real and what isn't.

I think it is interesting to explore not only the stories themselves but also the circumstances in which they arise and the manner in which they are introduced to the unwary public.

Stories are out of favor right now, and it is just because of this that they hold such power. They come in under the guise of real information, which reporters are just now beginning to understand. I think it is because of this that most of us are so much more interested in outright fantasy, such as Star Wars and Batman; it is presented as not real, and therefore is sterile and safe. One author/screenwriter who remains popular in exception to this is Michael Crichton, who manages to add a shadow of reality to his techno-thrillers through research and endnotes.

It seems the one area of reality that we have left is that of sports, but even that category is crumbling in the face of creeping commercialism which has begun to cast doubt on the integrity of some events. You can watch or replay in your head the plot from 'Field of Dreams' and understand it in the same light as some of these other examples. The whole historical premise on which 'Dreams' is based is the half-truth that Shoeless Joe Jackson and other players threw a baseball game for money. This half truth is then built upon with real people, such as J.D. Salinger (who became Terrence Mann in the movie). A whole new story, with its own myth and atmosphere, is built into an enormous edifice of poetry that transcends the controversial event upon which it is based.

If you look closely in our millennial (or is it millenial?) world, you will find many such unrealities masquerading as fact. More on this in a later (or is it earlier?) post.

Oxytocin and Trust, Fact and Fiction

New research shows a strong correlation between the presence of the hormone Oxytocin and the trust and love that mammals have for one another. The hormone is often present during lactation and reproduction. Scientists have developed a spray that can be used as a deoderant that is being marketed as an alternative to Aluminum Chlorhydrate, which has been linked to breast cancer.

Parts of the above statement are true. I've cleverly mixed truth with fiction to create a plausible article which I hope will become a rumor. More on rumors and viruses in another post.

The Sagan Effect

After reading some of the latest science news, I'm beginning to see a strong trend that seems to be going under the radar of our stellar news industry. It seems like every other scientist is after evidence that life could (not necessarily does) exist on other worlds. In my effort to classify everything under according to it's conspiracy category, I hereby name this phenomena the Sagan Effect. You heard it here first.

Thus, here we have bacteria that can perform photosynthesis where no sunlight exists, under the ocean. Same said bacteria and many other organisms can exist near geologic steam vents at temperatures in excess of 300 degrees Celsius, which is to say, they might exist on worlds with conditions not normally conducive to life.

Does the scientific world know something it isn't telling, or are they just working subconsciously under the idea that finding other life in the universe is inevitable?

Variety and prediction

"It pays a prophet not to be too specific" --- Robert A. Heinlein

One of the great things about being eccentric is that you see everything from the obtuse angle. One of the things that people respond to is quality, another is sincerity, but the media and entertainment industry seem to be stuck on experimenting with the continuum of indecency, between 'risque' and 'crude'. If quality or sincerity get woven in, its usually an accident. This is killing the sitcom industry, where all the writers, it seems, understood 'Seinfeld' in terms of its crudity, when the real reason people tuned into it was the quality of the humor and the excellent comic acting and timing.

During Seinfelds run, I remarked to a friend how much it reminded me of the old 'Dick Van Dyke' show in its pacing and combination of slapstick with one-liners. And of course, Seinfeld was noted for its respectful and wonderful use of the older school of comedians and actors in its supporting cast and guest stars.

The next big idea for television waiting in the wings is a true revival of the forum called the Variety Show. This genre in its classic form is gone. Most of its good examples are extremely dated, such as Sid Caesar's Show of Shows and The Carol Burnett Show. How simple it would be for a new Jerry Seinfeld type to pick it up, dust it off, and create some wonderful new and up to date television.

Of course, it would also be simple to mess it up by lacing it with jokes about masturbation, tits and ass, and who is screwing who. Get real, Burbank: us little folks out east are tired of that swill, its old stuff.

Look for someone with talent to pick up the Variety Show and run with it.

Good Director of the Week

You've heard a lot about Batman Begins, some of it isn't even hype.

Christopher Nolan is the director of what critics are calling 'one of the best comic book movies ever'.




This is his last incredible movie, Memento, a 'film noir' that was not as big a release as Batman Begins, but one that may be superior to it. In Memento, the central figure doesn't have any long term memory. As a result, he goes through life from moment to moment, attempting to find his way with handwritten notes and tattooed messages.

In 'Batman', Nolan brings us a very well-directed 'Origin of' movie, with excellent casting and enough special effects to make the action fans happy. But what makes this movie stand out from the others in the series is its look at Bruce Wayne and his motivations for becoming the Dark Knight.

Ironically, for all it transcends the genre, in the end this is still a movie about Batman saving a corrupt and seedy Gotham City. But it shows you how even a comic book hero can be interesting in the hands of a great director. I predict that Christopher Nolan will be eventually recognized as one of THE great dramatic directors of his generation.

Bad Movie of the Week

A scene from Identity




'Identity' , which I saw on HBO this weekend, easily wins the Stephen King award for bad movie of the week.

Just to give you a flavor of what you missed, Amanda Peet plays an imaginary character named Paris who is hiding a stash of cash so that she can buy a field in Florida and grow oranges, her lifelong dream. Oh, and she is also an imaginary hooker, and as usual, the only reason for watching this movie from beginning to end.

The reason this film rates bad movie of the week is because it shamelessly bases its whole plot on the psychological illness of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), already panned by Charlie Kaufmann in 'Adaptation' and painfully misused by Stephen King and Johnny Depp in 'the Secret Window'.

In this movie, a sick killer is wheeled into what amounts to a midnight meeting of his psychologist and the parole board and Governor so they can witness him living through his painful murdering of all but one of his ELEVEN personalities.

In his ninety minute flashback, he becomes victim, killer, and pursuer of the killer, as we are clumsily and melodramatically taken in detail through every violent imaginary murder. However, we mustn't forget that he really DID kill all of these folks at an isolated motel out west. After all, that's what makes the whole movie so 'compelling'.

Imaginary or not, let's hear it for the actress' HEAD bumping around in the dryer in the motel laundromat. Then there is John Cusack, the actress' chauffeur, sewing up the severed artery of another woman who he just happened to run over on the dark and stormy night ('I wish we had beige thread. It would have looked so much better') . But did I mention that Ray Liotta was escorting a serial killer to prison on the same evening? Let's not forget the young just-married couple who are not pregnant, or the dysfunctional trio of Mom, Stepdad, and young Timmy(Or is it Tommy?), who lost his father and his voice in some other poorly constructed movie plot.

Who am I leaving out? Oh yes, the motel manager, a Hitchcockian misfit who just 'took over' when the real manager dropped dead in his soup years ago. I don't think we can count the real manager as a character, because he is dead in the walk in freezer for most of the movie. Since when does a deserted motel have a walk-in freezer?

Oh, but I forgot, the whole sordid plot is the fabrication of the sick mind of a killer, so all inconsistencies are not only forgiven, they add to the logic of the plot: the killer is not only a psycho, he is an incompetent screenwriter. And after all, how else can you get the victims out in the rain except by having them try to find a good cellular phone connection?

Of course, we are not supposed to know that the killer-victims-pursuers are all the same person. After all, that is a secret, only revealed until the middle of the movie. ('Wait, while we're being murdered, what do we have in common? We all have the same birthday. We all are named after places. Professor, what does it mean?') What genius.

If you want to enjoy dissociative personality disorder(DID) as I/We do, read Jose Luis Borges' works, or at least check out 'Adaptation', one of the best movies of all time. 'DID' , as it is affectionately acronymed by professionals, is just one of the multiple ways to slip between the linearity of Ordinary Time. Its a shame that it is misused in Hollywood, at a waste of so many serious actors.

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This white page is so much cheesier than my mouse.
No balls, just lasered,
Sterile and cold. Blowing high
With the suffering clouds.

You have no idea
As I talk and the words fall
Like icicles
Before they can reach you.
Its me. Its me. You

You would rather hear about Hera, wouldn’t you?

Claws, red
With acetone blood,
Like the soft hole of her mouth

Wet red.

Again and again I could circle her painted eyes,
Hoping for an arrow to dart my way.

My life, my time, my young man days
Are dashed upon her stone hard beauty.
Sculpted in softness
Flowing rock, lava flow
Blazing.

Arrogant Bees

Arrogant Bees

Stinging my eyes and you laugh,
A sunset mourning for today’s flowers,

Tears caress, carelessly crying
Drowned, out by your cackling. Don’t stop
Remembering me. Render my fat, as you would make soap,
The kind that stings
Your eyes in the shower.

Long Live Wolf Kahn

My favorite living artist is German born Wolf Kahn. There should really be more accessible images of his best work online, but here is an interesting sample:




Wolf, wherever you are today, thanks for pushing the butter fat around. For those of you who want a better look at his work, see the book 'Wolf Kahn' by Justin Spring. See it at Amazon and buy it.

Evidence is deceiving

Evidently, evidence is not going to work in most arguments.

Today, inclusiveness is good, non-inclusiveness is bad, and any who disagree are not human beings but filthy animals.

Not that I have anything against animals. You're not an animal hater are you? Because if you are, then you are less than human.

Labels

We like to label everything and everybody. Liberal, conservative, Muslim, Jew, young, old, black, white, red, yellow.

But at the end of the day, all there is that we are talking to is a person. Someone with their own hopes and dreams, their own personal problems that transcend any traditional guidelines or labels. Someone that has feelings and needs.

Right Mom?