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.