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'.

With his acceptance for part of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilzcek has resuscitated the ether, rechristening it the grid.

Basically, the grid is the space time continuum, out of which particles come, or more accurately, their quarks, which behave like particles themselves at very small (subnuclear) distances.

It's about time. The dual nature of particles can now be studied in the light of this reparidigm.

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.

Tales of Power and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I've reviewed this book elsewhere, but what I really wanted to talk about was something that Daniel Noel touched upon in 'Seeing Castaneda'.

Reading the latest buzz on Castaneda, he seems pretty much totally discredited as an anthropologist.

However, as an observer or conjurer of human perception and sensibility, he is everything that he said he was. Obviously, given the historical references to his life, the man approached what we consider a cult figure, complete with women who followed him around, something we can easily follow in his books. You might say that he took advantage of his celebrity status and worked back and forth between his books and his followers much as an artist would work with his patrons and audience to popularize himself and his work.

What is fascinating about this approach is that it is self-consistent with the arts of manipulation written about in his books. Furthermore, if we take the incongruency of his writings with what we might call reality or everyday reality, and look at the way society relentlessly renders such incongruencies as superficial or otherwise unworthy of notice, we find even more self-consistency.

Castaneda the faker managed to fake a great many people out for six years. That he is essentially discredited at this time is to miss the whole point of his success at exactly what he claims he was taught by Don Juan. He truly turned writing into an 'act of sorcery' , creating a semiplausible account that was actually taken as the real thing for quite awhile. You might call it nothing more than a 'beautiful hoax' on the level of a fake Vermeer or Piltdown Man, except that Castaneda went much further, actually pointing out what he was doing by having Don Juan point out what he was doing to Carlos.

Which brings us to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. How strange to find almost exactly the permutation of reality that Carlos writes about in a series of essays on scientific experimentation. Now, in no way would I suggest that Kuhn, a scientific historian, is mystical in his approach to the history of science. On the contrary, he exudes careful discernment between the subtleties of concepts he maps out, from paradigms to scientific data. And though he's been accused of being a relativist, I think it would be more accurate to say he's doing something akin to phenomenology here: writing down what he's observed and putting it together as a theory, or thesis.

But these two writers, now both departed, have given us two sides of a golden coin, so to speak. Because what they are dealing with is how humans apprehend reality. And this is quantum behavior, wave action that they are discussing, although they don't know it.

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.