Wolf Kahn Flattery

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

Rats in the Gutter

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

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

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

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

Reinventing Gravity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Subject

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

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

Ikebana

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

The Man Who Heard Voices

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



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



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



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



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

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



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

Grotne Nuke

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

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

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

Review: Kirby, King of Comics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Grid: Frank Wilczek and Physics

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Unhistoric Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Pure Movie: Fireproof Religulous

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


Well, maybe not.






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





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










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

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


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

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

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

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

Kimmie Rhodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rationality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tales of Power and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inlepid

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

Corona Udder Butter

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

It softens and relieves pain from sore teats and udders.

Google Hronir

This is beginning to get scary.

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

It turns out there is a hole in the ocean.

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

Survival of the fittest theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphysics of Probability

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

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

Or that we will get 20 heads in a row.

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

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

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

Sadness Twice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

klempare

klempare - puzzled; at a loss.

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

Glimmace

Definition of glimmace:

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

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

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

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

Fast forward to 1995

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

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

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

And the numbers are still in my head.

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

My backyard considers me
An intruder
An alien

Strange and shuddering

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

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

Gershwin's World

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



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



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

2008 isn't going to be late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Emporium

The number 4. Is it really necessary?

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

Who cares?

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

The overdue book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the book fines are mounting.

Infinity again and again

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



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



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

Hronir

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

Borges can't be fixed.

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

Maybe tomorrow.

Or yesterday, depending.

For one instant

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

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

A memory of presence,
Beauty,
Perfection,

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

The power
Of the moment of that presence,

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

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

Remembering
That one incredible, eternal moment.

Sarah Sze

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

The evil of dividing by zero

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

(Go Here to see details.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will the internet shorten our acceptance time of new concepts?

I doubt it.

Who can't rant?

Parpol.

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

Welcome to World

There is no greater art than artlessness.

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

You might be surprised.

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

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

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

Aren't we different?

By the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HGTV at Cornell University

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

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

Thank you, Joseph.

Is time continuous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile...

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

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

Is this any better?

Urgent Message

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

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

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

Powdered charisma
And seasoned regrets

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

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

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

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

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

Expect the unexpected: A paradox - Part 1

Is there a large sinkhole in your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waxing Metaphysical

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

The Easy Key to Dreams

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

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

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

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

Beware the adverb, masquerading importantly.

Or...

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

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

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

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

[Unedited post from sleep journal 19]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we stray from the real topic which is Unreality.

The March of Alex Wurman

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

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

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

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

Google Granker

Little Granker, all alone

Little Granker, like a tanker,

Fishing for a pony roan

Why are you so pity full?

When is cob a nob or bull?

Music Review: Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones

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

Cars are cars, all over the world.

Maybe I think too much.

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

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

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

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