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.

Untitled

Untitled

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?

August 4, 2005

On that day, a year and three weeks hence, I easily imagine myself sitting in air conditioned splendor on the fifth floor of the Flagship Hotel in Galveston. I'm wearing a blue cotton shirt. My wife is out on the patio, throwing crackers to the swooping seagulls.

The point of this mental exercise is to understand that we are NOT bound by space and time, and that our minds ARE quantum organs capable of amazing acts that science cannot begin to comprehend, such as visiting the future or other places our bodies cannot get to.

Borges and Castaneda and Vermeer and Satie all touched on these issues. Asimov hints at it and of course, Hawking lives it every day in his wheelchair. I'm still reconciling the fact of quantum mind with the phenomenon of God, which seems to be related to it.

More on this at an earlier date.

You are not here

Today things happened.

Even Stephen

I think that Steven Hawking is a saint
At least a wizard,
As he chairs his way through time

Stopping now and then to exude genius
And incomprehensibility. The letter
That I wrote him, when he was in Spain,
Was never answered. How cruel.

They still call me heartless
For cursing the day I was born, under my breath.
The shades of drill steel yellow
Grip themselves around my waist.

Tomorrow I will have fallen
Off of the roof
By Two.

But today I am in Spain.

Equipment evaluation notes - Week 1

There is no justice. The weather is beautiful here in Koln, and we plan on driving over to Paris this weekend. I should be able to view my old apartment from the Hill. Last night we stayed out late drinking at one of the mini breweries and had quite a long walk back to the hotel on the Rhine. The white asparagus is in season, and we hope to get some tomorrow.

Last night Gary said that we may be here another two weeks because the testing isn't going as well as he had hoped. The Germans don't care too much for the programming that IBM did for us.

The funniest thing happened yesterday. I was shopping in the square around the Dom, getting souvenir toys for my sons, and found out my company issued American Express card had expired, even though I've been using it successfully for the last four days. Well, just like the silly Karl Malden commercials, I found an American Express office on the west side of the Dom, and they were able to get my card confirmed and renewed. There was another guy in there who was from L.A. and we started talking about the riots.

Anyway, in about ten minutes they had me fixed up with another card, so I guess I can hold onto all the German Marks and paper money that I got at the exchange.

Rick called from work and said that when we get back the company has bought personal computers for all of us, part of the deal with IBM. They're supposed to run something called Windows, and we won't have to use multimate anymore to write reports. There's a class next month that Wes is going to teach.

More tomorrow.

Narrow escape

Hormones were never meant to be used in the presence of 8 track tapes. My Pioneer unit almost caused a disaster with the dimmer lights on low in my room last night. Fortunately, my complexion once again saved me, replacing self-loathing with self-loathing.

Ayn Rand won't care if I don't believe in her anymore, because she's hiding behind her russian accent in the corner. What I'm feeling has no words, but it goes with looking in a mirror and wondering who this is. It also goes with looking back at the past few days and wondering why the hell I did and said so many stupid things.

I need to get some more bags for my comic books.