The Emporium

The number 4. Is it really necessary?

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

Who cares?

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

The overdue book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the book fines are mounting.

Infinity again and again

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



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



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

Hronir

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

Borges can't be fixed.

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

Maybe tomorrow.

Or yesterday, depending.

For one instant

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

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

A memory of presence,
Beauty,
Perfection,

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

The power
Of the moment of that presence,

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

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

Remembering
That one incredible, eternal moment.

Sarah Sze

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

The evil of dividing by zero

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

(Go Here to see details.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will the internet shorten our acceptance time of new concepts?

I doubt it.

Who can't rant?

Parpol.

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

Welcome to World

There is no greater art than artlessness.

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

You might be surprised.

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

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

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

Aren't we different?

By the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HGTV at Cornell University

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

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

Thank you, Joseph.

Is time continuous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile...

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

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

Is this any better?

Urgent Message

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

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

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

Powdered charisma
And seasoned regrets

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected: A paradox - Part 1

Is there a large sinkhole in your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waxing Metaphysical

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

The Easy Key to Dreams

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

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

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

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

Beware the adverb, masquerading importantly.

Or...

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

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

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

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

[Unedited post from sleep journal 19]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we stray from the real topic which is Unreality.

The March of Alex Wurman

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

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

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

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

Google Granker

Little Granker, all alone

Little Granker, like a tanker,

Fishing for a pony roan

Why are you so pity full?

When is cob a nob or bull?

Music Review: Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones

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

Cars are cars, all over the world.

Maybe I think too much.

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

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

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

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

The Oscars were on tonight

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

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

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

Poem of the Night: Contrived You Find a Caress

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

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

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

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

Fantastic Four #93

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cup holders make an appearance on the radar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning can be beauty.

Meaning can be unbeauty.

It is and isn't where you find it.

Here and now, then and there, no matter.

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

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

The other thing

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

Opening the door and letting airsand flood the room.

An open comment to Edward Witten and Lee Smolin

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 24, 2006.

E. Noidenoid

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

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

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

Hallowalloween.

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

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

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

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

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

Still I feel it.

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

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

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

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

Poem of the momentum - Impromptu

Impromptu

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

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

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

He held her
She held back

Then he let go
And so did she

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

Jung and consciousness

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









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

Can a madman make a difference?

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

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

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

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

That is, if all of you actually exist.

Poem of the minute: Perfume

Perfume

Twirling maybe
Lights dimmed past visionary state

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

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

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

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

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


- Athens, 2003 erik_satie_rollerblading

Jose Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phrases that stand out

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

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

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

Overt flower paths.

Drained word roulette.

Ordinary. Soliloquy.

I am the entertainer

Billy Joel, Entertainer Jim Cramer, Entertainer

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

Who has been here?

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

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

*******

Frank Black

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

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

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

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

Websen

Theres something about websen

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

Today's reason to go insane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capacitors - poem of the month or so

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

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

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

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

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

Sudoku, a fad in action

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

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

If only I could lose a tournament somewhere.

Here are some of these puzzles to get you started.

A poem a day: Arrogant Bees

Arrogant Bees

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

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

Hurricanes, Crisis, and Groupthink: An analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretending the world outside exists

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

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

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

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

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

Maggots, Murder, and Men : Book Review

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

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

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

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

Orchids and Baseball

Excerpt from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oxytocin and Trust, Fact and Fiction

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

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

The Sagan Effect

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

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

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