Wednesday 21 December 2016

separation anxiety or we can remember it for you wholesale

Writing for The Atlantic, Rebecca Searles explores a strange new sort of metaphysical detachment that some users experience after testing out virtual-reality and then forced to confront their mundane, authentic realities. Somewhere on the scale between awakening from an odd dream and Total Recall, unreality can be a lingering thing (as sophisticated as it has become) and once oneironauts get their sea-legs and can cope with the physical disorientation, some can start to develop symptoms of post VR sadness when the experience is over. What do you think? Given that the point of VR is to deliver an experience as realistic as possible—and perhaps even a hyper-realistic one where humans aren’t bound by mortal weaknesses, perhaps it ought not come as a surprise and accepted as a natural consequence, especially when the sheltered existence is perceived to be something better than the everyday alternative.

Sunday 13 November 2016

famous blue raincoat

I’m sure on any number of counts that 2016 has been told it seriously needs to ease off and it has seemed particularly harsh on musicians.
While ignorant of poet and performer Leonard Cohen until I was introduced to him in college (choice words and work courtesy of Nag on the Lake) and often conflating his lyrics and repertoire with the likes of Nick Cave and others whose acquaintance I just met, I did cherish the fact that hidden away somewhere was a resonant truth—to be confronted sparingly, but more out of neglect and distraction rather than fancying one secure from sophomoric matters of the heart or out of prescience that what’s genuine is cheapened by its loitering presence. As with David Bowie, Cohen had just completed a new album before passing and just a week previously, I had heard an excellent interview with the artist that got me nostalgic and excited to get to know him again—but importantly, just as grateful to count him as an influence, one of those strains that ought to be revisited at different stages of life in the hopes that with age comes wisdom and nuance.

Thursday 3 November 2016

with my sword and magic helmet or electric youth

Fast Company features a suite of wearables—an exoskeletal enhancement, that impart super powers on those who don them.
There’s a harness, a truss that provides gentle nudges to keep one oriented and an earpiece that promises to filter out unwanted environmental noises and enable people to have a conversation that rises about the general din without shouting themselves hoarse, but what I found most clever was a concept (that’s been in development for several years apparently) called the Ouijiband, referencing those involuntary, nervous motions that move a planchette across a Ouija board, that would attach to the user’s wrist to guide and refine one’s dexterity—be it improving on a surgeon’s hand or as a mechanical trainer to perfect one’s tennis-swing. What do you think? Once we have these prosthetic-assists available, is it negligent to try out anything without them? There is the question of ego versus responsibility on one hand, if one indeed foregoes the short-cut in the first place, but what happens to play and experimentation if none of us are willing to doff our accessories?

Saturday 4 June 2016

unreliable narrator or where is my mind?

ร†on magazine (which I realise that to my peril, I am not reading as often as I ought) presents a really fascinating proposition on the philosophy of the mind that suggests that perhaps we are not our own privileged witnesses to our own internal narrative and that the inner-workings of our thoughts are as inaccessible to our conscious-thinking as those presented by others around us.
As we mature, we (hopefully) through a capacity for empathy learn to understand expectations and to reasonably interpret the thoughts of another and react according. What if, however, our treasured internal monologue were only just as “superficial” as our limited mindreading abilities turned inward? If empathy works well enough for social beings, why add another speaking-role to cognition? Evidence in support of this position lies in a battery of tests that demonstrate how individuals readily assign volition (preference) to purely unconscious choices—not that we cannot be aware of our motivations, just that a lot of our actions and beliefs might be less transparent than we’d like to think.

Wednesday 20 April 2016

sequestered or the long now

Via the Presurfer, we learn about the resting place outside of the city of Chicago where the first nuclear reactor and associated waste was interred. Researchers at the University of Chicago, working under a top secret commission to bring the powerhouse on-line before the Axis Powers, under the supervision of Enrico Fermi, achieved this first sustainable, controlled reaction at the woodland laboratory in 1942.
The experimental Chicago Piles (CP-1 through CP-3) ran for about a decade until brought off-line and buried in situ—marked with granite blocks and the warning to potential grave-robbers that digging is not advised—though safe for visitors due to the low yield and shielding used for this prototype. Reading this postcard reminded me of the call for submissions several years back on how to handle the nuclear waste of contemporary times, which is much longer-lived and far more deadly and poses a significant problem that the next ten thousand generations of Earthlings will need to contend with. From a vantage point far older than human civilisation itself, how could we ensure that the message of danger and to keep away from today’s nuclear waste disposal sites are imparted to the future? Proposals included a defensive, infernal landscape with sand berms and giant totems of tortured souls, giant steely thorns like the sort that enveloped Sleeping Beauty’s castle, or even a priesthood of sorts to bridge the millennia and warn off the curious and scavengers that indeed you will be struck down by beams of invisible energy if you defile this ancient temple. Can you think of a way to signal danger that won’t be liable to misinterpretation, or is our bequest an unmarked grave?

Monday 1 February 2016

walled-garden or class-war/cola-war

Just in case you missed this latest incarnation of patron-generated guerilla-marketing, one soft-drink empire is inviting consumers to craft sleek little animations of whatever “tasting the seeing” means to them—launched off the equally dubious platform of enjoying this beverage of choice from a personalised aluminium can that bears one’s name.
I would not want to dally long in this corporate, branded wall-garden but I suppose that I am missing the point then. People certainly were quick to RSVP to this call for mockery but regrets-only were limited, it seems as the company presciently censored most words and phrases that might prove disparaging. The crack investigative team at The Atlantic that tried to finagle their way through this Orwellian call for submissions attempted to create an advertisement that invoked the “late stage capitalism” meme, which is s fitting one and a prediction of Marxist thinking, holding that despite capitalism’s opportunistic nature, there comes a point of market super-saturation and a point beyond which the system cannot continue, without new buyers—most likely aliens, since we’ve already tried selling contact-anxiety and convincing everyone to be entrepreneurs in the worst, cloying ways. Other taboo subjects included politics, religion, health and medicine. It is not only the cola-warriors who’ve assayed this life-style form of suggest, however, what with a large chain of coffee houses eager to have imagined loyal loiterers share their life experiences or a fast food franchise that floated the idea of accepting paying-it-forward in lieu of actual cash-money. It seems that most venues are like this. What do you think? Would you like to play in this sort of world?

Friday 29 January 2016

missing-link or not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin

At first, I was a little sceptical about the claim and the mystery that the subject of the human race’s facial anatomy espouses, however, after reading the first few lines of this essay from The Atlantic, I began to really appreciate this puzzle.
Like those palaeontologists who are able to prestidigitate a complete dinosaur specimen out of a single length of bone, the subtle protrusion on our jaws that forms our chin has been pointing researchers in all sorts of different, wagging directions—and the question has been perplexing evolutionary biologists since the very beginnings. Not even our closest relatives—nor those branches of the family tree that withered away—possess the same sort of jaw-line (though some argue that elephants have a similar feature) and science, and not for a lack of speculation, chin scratching—has so far failed to deliver a plausible explanation. All the suggestions have been refuted—such a configuration would not have made it easier to chew or talk or act as an effective face-guard for cavemen fisticuffs. That last bit about duelling savages strikes me as particularly Victorian—like their unhealthy preoccupation with dinosaur husbandry and mating practises. What do you think? Chins couldn’t have become a dominate trait out of a need to stuff pillowcases or fold fitted-sheets, and the answer probably lies in a convergent constellation of factors that we’ve not yet untangled. It’s also funny how chins (as well with teeth for ducks) are one of those features we immediately anthropomorphise to the point where we’re blind to its absence.

Wednesday 27 January 2016

6x6

dress the flesh: the rise of the plant-butcher, via Kottke’s quick-links

three is a magic number: the creative talent behind “Schoolhouse Rock!”

linear b: excellent, freshly available image and textual library of the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinia 

neural handshake: meet the neurosurgeon who tried to hack his brain and nearly lost his mind

the genlteman’s recreation in four parts: seventeenth century common dog names included Ranter and Jollyboy

 chicken dance festival: a creative and award-winning re-imaging of The Shining is classified under the genre of cinegraffiti

Friday 1 January 2016

solipsism or monkey see, monkey do

One of the more compelling ideas that I’ve encountered lately supposes that humans have developed such a relatively advanced range of expression over other animals—not that other creatures are silent and without cognition and we are constantly underestimating the mental worlds of our close and more distant relations—due to the limiting factor of solipsism. Metaphysics usually does not rear itself in the study of biology and evolution, but perhaps this position, which is one of the hallmarks of Cartesian philosophy and refers to a mode of thought where only one’s own mind can be accorded absolute surety and trust and there are impressions out there whose essence and depth is unknowable and might not exist at all.
Apes might not wonder if they are brains in vat or regard their fellow primates as philosophical zombie—possibly but we are not privy of course to those thoughts, and do display a limited sense of collaboration when it comes to things like bonding or child-rearing and can learn. A test that’s always interesting for all sorts of species is how they react to their reflection in a mirror. One does not see evidence, however, of the kind of advanced cooperation and planning dependent on others that might prompt the cultivation of vocabulary and language. In colonial species, like bees, ants and mole-rats we see apparently the opposite extreme, where there is no self, only the hive. I wonder if it’s in the human psyche to transcend that doubt in order to get along yet retain and be able to articulate those nagging concerns—whether our world is a delusion crafted by an Evil Genius and we are in the Matrix—that endowed and nurtured communication and abstraction. Following the old regime of esteeming animals as dumb and insensitive and without souls, humans did not see any value in reaching out to them and similarly, if one was unable to escape (even provisionally) his or her epistemological prisons, there would be little need to communicate beyond the most basic level. What do you think? Given the near gentic and physiological sameness, could origins of language lie in this skepticism and dissociation?

Wednesday 30 December 2015

fermi’s paradox or good fences make good neighbours

In the 1950s astrophysicist and futurist Enrico Fermi posed the question that encapsulated not whether we were alone in the Universe but rather where is everybody, and given his lack of the cosmological observations of the present, put forward a pretty stupendous conjecture that’s but puzzled over since. Granted that at the time, many of the important criteria were know—the extreme old age of the Universe, its size, the commonality of stars but significantly, the commonality of stars harbouring planets, approaching one hundred percent and it would probably be more unusual for a star not to have a solar system, still the expectation remained that there ought to be alien life out there in abundance. This postulate has inspired a lot of debate by individuals with far superior credentials but I think it’s a very worthwhile exercise to try to imagine the counterintuitive:

  • Intelligent life is something rare or unique—seemingly unlikely across the eons and vast distances, populated with stellar and planetary bodies, though natural cataclysm might account for relatively short-lived civilizations
  • It’s in the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself and others—more likely given our track record (seminal events like harnessing the destructive power of atom or bad environmental stewardship) and the fittest life forms to evolve would force out the weaker
  • We’re listening but not too chatty ourselves—the totem space-invaders depiction of the Arecibo Message represents one of the few times humans have intentionally reached out
  • The Earth is dismissed as something too exposed—hardy humans don’t hide within Dyson spheres and those with more delicate constitutions could not imagine that place being hospitable or like us, they’re turning in on themselves, content with virtual reality, fantasy and vicarious living or worried about economic and social disruption as exploitative schemes become unsustainable
  • Humans are intentional kept at bay—we are excluded as inmates of an alien zoo, they fear us given that our imagined portrayals of contact are often brutal, xenophobic and catastrophic
  • Aliens are too alien—their sense of timing or scale may be totally out of sync with ours or our symbols, glyphs and patterns go unrecognised like theirs do for us

What do you think? Do you have any theories? We don’t have any basis of comparison of course, except ourselves and though unlikely to disburden ourselves from esteem and bias, it is rather extraordinary that in the time that humans have existed, physiologically and intellectually recognisable as humans, all of recorded history—rounding it off to a segment of ten thousand years—could have repeated nearly two dozen times or more already, if allowed to play out from its inception to conclusion. All that fits into just the last few million years and does not even touch the billions that came before. The paradox itself could be responsible for this silence as a sort of self-propagating disbelief across the galaxy that surely we cannot be the first to reach out or be contacted.

Tuesday 29 December 2015

homage or the hero with a thousand faces

Quiet a few vocal critics have accused the continuance of the Star Wars saga of being too derivative—and yes (sans spoilers) it would have been more enthralling to have a bigger constellation of strange fellows in some Mos Eisley dive or Jabba’s throne room to wonder about. a musical number or to see all the characters to gather together at the end like in previous parting shots and wondering whether it was “no bigger than a womprat” did sort of draw me out of the experience, I think unfairly. The arc of each episode—maybe to exclusion of the exposition—faithfully follows the monomyth, that boon of New England scholar Joseph Campbell for innumerable tales past and present that resonate as something whole and satisfying with tribute to something universal.
That terms is borrowed from James Joyce’s writing—sourced with another handy moniker, the quark. Campbell crafted the study of comparative mythology following an unending infatuation with CG Jung and his idea of the collective unconscious and the archetype and unvetted released his comprehensive thesis, The Hero with 1000 Faces, in the 1940s and echoes in the best of contemporary story-telling, drawing from the cues of classic myth. Episode III, point for point, unfolds as a monomyth—wherein a reluctant hero (Luke Skywalker, moisture farmer) is visited by a celestial messenger (the droids and Obi Wan Kenobi) to present his mission and hone his skills and embarks on a quest to find his muse and divine lady (Princess Leia—but thirty-eight year old spoilers: really his sister) but finds himself in the proverbial belly of the whale, like Jonah or Pinocchio (the dianoga in the Death Star trash compactor) before being forced to confront his father. All the best stories seem to twist in this wind, whether classical mythology, founding tales or biblical previsioning—tapping into formulaic stories that ring as believable and upbuilding. The Parnassus and individual instalments—as myth is fluid and not fixed practise self-plagiarism with certain and popular troupe. The authoritative editions are those most successful and resonate with our own collective unconscious. The re-telling is more than a reboot.

Monday 28 December 2015

trivium and hoi polloi

I’ve really been enthralled with my latest podcast discovery in Doctor William Webb’s Heritage Podcast project (thanks to a hale and hearty recommendation by Sharyn Eastaugh, creator and hostess of The History of the Crusades, to get on board with the syllabus before the ambitious project gets too expansive to catch up on back episodes) and had a welcome reminder on the virtue of a Liberal Arts degree—not just one in name but one that’s true to original core curricula as it was expounded in ancient times.
With participatory democracy burgeoning and society becoming more hierarchical but also urban, leaders of the Polis recognised the need for a basic civics education requirement to attract and retain individuals with the ability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry and developed a three-pronged prospectus called the trivia—grammar (the basic rules of communication—stringing together ฮปฮฟฮณฮฟฯ‚), rhetoric (the art of persuasion and articulacy and perhaps the training to wield it for one’s own ends) and logic (the faculty to soberly judge the validity and truth of argument and perhaps keenly peer beyond grandiloquence). Once the tradition of active and engaged citizens started to be supplanted by feudalism and the fealty of labourers and the political man became a subject, his affairs rarefied and to be managed by hereditary kings, as the Classical World came to an end, basic education was something seditious and there was no demand for an informed and potentially rebellious under-class. Of course, the institution of the Church—with its own vested interests in sustaining a community of inquisitive and engaged members—was the mainstay of continuing-education—augmenting the trivium with four additional disciplines: mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.
Perhaps these subjects smack of something a bent a bit toward the practical and vocational, their coursework—as with the unfolding of word, language—however, can be expressed as the germination of number, leading to number in space, number in time and then with astronomy, number in time and space. Perhaps we’ve again entered a time when a liberal education (the motto of my alma mater—which evolved out of a preparatory school and is rather a singular beast in higher-education is a Latin malapropism “facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque”—I make free men from children by means of books and a balance) is something to be disdained as a superfluous luxury or even a liability when the plebiscite is expected to keep its collective head down and not stint the ceremony of elections with engagement and activism that goes beyond party-membership and reinforced believes. Being schooled in a little bit of logic seems especially vital now for countering the techniques in the media and politics that present the fallacious and specious as something incontrovertible, and something (regardless whether one becomes a charismatic or not—I think one can’t truly start believing his or her own deceits if discovered through honest means) for disabusing ourselves of our own biases. Despite the tenor of the age, there’s no excuse for letting one’s faculties atrophy. Don’t let it rest on the President’s desk. Q.E.D.

Saturday 26 December 2015

รฆon of horus or top row, from left to right

Just before Christmas (Sun in first Capricorn and Moon in ninth Gemini, just a day’s breadth from the Soltice), the historic Boleskin Manor on the shores of Loch Ness, owned by mystic Aleister Crowley and subsequently bought by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame (for its connection with majick) was partially destroyed by a fire that had broken out in the vacant residence.
Crowley choose this spot for its particular geographic resonance (appearances of the Loch Ness Monster could be attributed to certain demons and familiars from his pantheon) with his philosophy of Thelema and his mission of occult outreach and made some major modifications to the house to these ends. Ostracised as a traitor and corrupter of youth, Crowley repaired to a commune in Cefalรน—by Palermo, Sicily—to establish his church, an anti-monestary in this ancient Greek outpost, until being banished under the same suspicions by Mussolini. Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same was filmed on the grounds of Boleskin and the motto “do what thou willst” features prominently in the band’s discography, as well as enjoying other pop culture appearances. The Sicilian abbey is currently on the market, though in grave disrepair.

Monday 14 December 2015

marginalia or many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Having taken more than three hundred fifty years to prove since the claim was first coyly presented and in fiction and popular culture, the final, mysterious conjecture by poly-math and number theorist Pierre de Fermat probably did not strike the mathematician himself nor its originally prompter as particularly significant. Fermat’s Last Theorem, as it has come to be known, was inspired by a book of lemmas by an ancient Greek mathematician called Diophantus of Alexandria. For this scholar, considered the father of algebra (not a terror-organisation and ought not to be intimidating to the public like one) for inventing variable notation and despite his monumentally new paradigm of recognising fractions as legitimate numbers, Diophantus (at least in his surviving books) did not break with the traditional penchant for finding whole number solutions for problems.
Finding a nice round solution is much more satisfying and resonates far more—I think, even given computational power that masks the ugly, irrational bits. The book of Diophantus that Fermat was reading, the Arithmetica, was rather a conversational, speculative investigation that proffered that right angled triangles (following the Pythagorean Theorem, a² + b² = c²) exist where the sides of the triangle work out to be whole numbers: 3² + 4² = 5² or 9 + 16 = 25. There seemed to exist as many solutions, however, where the answers were not so tidy. Seeing this, Fermat wondered if the application could be expounded to higher exponents (and thus dimensions—something squared is a flat surface as opposed to a three-dimensional cube) and running with it, asserted that no whole number solutions can exist for a³ + b³ = c³ or higher powers up to infinity. This assertion was scribbled, coyly, in the margin of Diophantus’ ponderings with the aside that there’s a nifty proof for this necessity but not enough room to write it here. Perhaps Fermat felt that the problem was not so pressing and never again returned to that particular problem, leaving generations to wrestle with it after his notes were discovered. There’s a whole cosmos of unsolved equations that might pose more appreciable and immediate significance if explained, and while there’s no obvious application in understanding why what Fermat declared is ultimately true, the insight and techniques developed in trying to find the answer have propelled mathematics forward and have enabled all sorts of progress in understanding and has shaped the modern world. I can’t claim any understanding of the famous proof and my brain starts to hurt from it, but I wonder if it also shows, for this celebrated and veteran conundrum, why it’s the case—that whole numbers are not transcendent.

Friday 11 December 2015

5x5

mandelbrot: elegant, shuffled fractals of gears

imperative: the moral dilemmas of self-driving cars

gender neutral: as a concession to how people actually use the Queen’s English, the singular they is now admissible in print—according to some sources

festoonery: clever, cheerful hospital Christmas dรฉcor

skywalker ranch: the European Space Agency’s upcoming ExoMars mission will include a moisture-farming unit

Thursday 10 December 2015

oversight or sense and sensibilia

Advocate of plain speaking, believing that heuristically people ought to be able to explore perception and reality and arrive at insights and truths through logic and simple language alone, Oxford professor John Langshaw Austin (no relation to author Jane, though much of his linguistic speculations were posthumously packaged under the above title) in the 1930s greatly expanded the nuanced understanding of the way meaning is imparted, demonstrating that sentences can be more than just interrogative, declarative or directive and in fact usually are none of these things and instead fall somewhere on the spectrum of doing things, a social task or a phememe.
After his wartime service in his majesty’s secret service (a tenure that a whole cadre of Oxbridge instructors took up) for which Austin was credited for as being instrumental in the success of the D-Day Invasion, Operation Overlord—however, perhaps influenced by his intelligence work, his research became even more engrossing in its accessibility. Packing his philosophical quiver, Austin dissected the language of excuse and pardon that people toss about with apparent abandon to find the pregnant meaning in all the ways to say that one is sorry and distance one’s self from moral decrepitude and omission. Not only is there an endless buffet of expressions to choose from to exculpate oneself—oversight, accident, mistake, mishap, misunderstanding, misstep, confusion, etc.—they all have subtle ethical connotations, on second look, that warrant further investigation. Though not naturally duplicitous, people are probably most honest about their feelings when they’re begging-off.

Sunday 6 December 2015

the fabulists or animal farm

As a freshman I can recall, in anticipation of reading the Platonic dialogues, that young, new students were warned off early on from drawing parallels of the trial and execution of Socrates and the judgement and crucifixion of Jesus—the comparison disdained as something obvious and sophomoric and rather a dangerous path to pursue. I of course was immediately drawn to the forbidden subject—completely new to me and probably nothing that I would have formulated on my own, but—wisely, I suppose, I kept that to myself.
Academics have come to recognize countless other messianic proceedings, both popularly and privately, and does tend to discourage reading too much into these dockets. One rather indulgent biography, with legendary portions and a lot of embellished and contradictory details of exploits and called a romance, addresses the life and career of a slave in Samos called ร†sop, whose fables with personified foxes, lambs, donkeys and other characters are so ingrained and indoctrinating that one would be pressed to fail at making the allusion. The talking animals explore power-relationships and this allegorical device is the only way a slave could possibly mock his social betters in a highly hierarchical society and hope to keep his head—though the allegory is a thinly-veiled thing and I always wondered about listeners not getting the subtext. No tyrant, however flattered and deluded, would exclaim, I think, “what do you I’m not the innocent little rabbit?” The life and times of ร†sop outside what is revealed in the fables is not really considered a reliably scholastic piece of work, there being too many versions and it’s mostly just lurid and with a lot of crude humour and misogyny, but the life of ร†sop is surprising similar to the two exemplars above—Socrates (also considered endearingly ugly) even composing fables in the style of ร†sop (many others have continued this tradition of the past three thousand years) as he’s awaiting his punishment, perhaps thinking that the direct-approach was the wrong way to go about things.
Most versions of the romance agree that ร†sop was born into slavery and sold to a wealthy sophist on the ร†gean island of Samos and was an extremely physically repulsive individual. Mute and without the power of speech at first, after showing kindness to a temple priestess, despite her being terrified of this ugly man offering help, the goddess Isis (figuring large in Greek culture also at the time) granted him not only the power of speech but also of eloquence. Glossing over the lewd episodes, ร†sop’s parables saved him in many situations and allowed him to show up the professors at the philosophical schools. The slave who was never allowed to purchase his freedom in the traditional sense but nevertheless enjoyed much respect and autonomy was himself put to death—on trumped up charges of slander, by being made to walk off a cliff in Delphi after having supposedly slandered Apollo. The gods, echoed by Socrates, have a tendency to mete out their own punishment without human help, and a slighted Apollo did not let offending mortals off that easily.

Tuesday 24 November 2015

unter den linden

A century ago tomorrow, Albert Einstein first presented his equations that dealt with two macroscopic fundamental forces of Nature—gravity and electromagnetism—to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in an attempt to generalise his previous fete—no mean achievement, in asserting E=mc²—that binds together mass and energy and applies a universal speed limit.
Already paring back non-objective that tended to compartmentalise and create illusions based on the beholder, Einstein sought to incorporate the theory of gravitation and yield something more satisfying than the classical idea that gravity was like an elastic band that was infinite and instantaneous, but rather masses sinking and rising due to their warping of spacetime. Experiment and observation confirm the framework again and again, but just as normalcy appears to abandon us at the scale of very tiny things, Einstein’s physics also seem to buckle under highly energetic conditions. When things are small enough or hot enough to invoke the other fundamental forces, the Strong (holds atomic nuclei together) and the Weak (responsible for radioactive decay), General Relativity suffers the same fate as Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanics. Science and knowledge of the Cosmos is always going to be something provisional, and I wonder if it’s not just the bias of our size and frame-of-reference to think everything ought to applicable at every level. Is that a reasonable expectation or the exactly the opposite?  Einstein himself is quoted (though perhaps one ought to be cautious of citations next to photographs on the internet, the intent remains) as saying, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” Eulogizing the loss of a life-long friend, Einstein really reflected, “this distinction between the past, present and future, is only an illusion, however tenacious.” What do you think?

Sunday 22 November 2015

matriculation or the kids are alright

When it was first published in September of this year, I really assayed and digested the lengthy and circumspect piece by The Atlantic called The Coddling of the American Mind, however the gravity of the situation remained in some higher orbital—to me—at least until recently through an interview with an American zookeeper to a British and international that zoos in the US, while preserving their educational utility as a destination for field-trips, strongly tended to shy away from displaying exhibits that suggested evolution and climate change for fear of causing offence. I realise that the transition from being students, participations and citizens to being consumers of educational and democratic experience is not exclusively an American problem and has no respect for borders or other enshrined approaches—though happily there’s still pushback, but obviously the American sandbox is the best environment to try to understand how this situation—the creation of pockets of refuge, whole institutionalised swaths of up-and-coming society that go coddled and unchallenged—came about and what consequences it could have.
The solution is not clear, I thought, and could only be described in terms of greater polemics, disparaging wealth gaps upheld with one’s all, and the fact we’ve grown accustomed to the passive recruitment of what resounds with us (what we’d like to hear re-enforced at the expense of dissenting alternatives) and the fact it’s never been easier to enlist in any crusade with only a modicum of personal discomfort—also never easier to condemn heretics and traitors to the cause. Of course, there has always been charismatics, people who fancy themselves above being challenged and certain mouthpieces for campaigning, and the whole of American society is far from sheltered and protected from the affronts of the Classics and the micro-aggressors, but never was there the fostering of a culture that would construct that best of all possible worlds. Not to suggest that organised religion is fully exonerated, but such a mindset seems to me to be partly responsible for the success in indoctrinating and the follow-on radicalisation of many individuals, who are unable to see further than than these familiar horizons. One of the greatest dangers and fount of all sorrows is the expectation that the world conforms to our our standards. The brilliant science-fiction writer Douglas Adams, in his Salmon of Doubt, puts this paradox another way—rather succinctly, with a self-aware puddle, at first in awe and rather self-sure because the hole it finds itself in fits the puddle perfectly and then in panic as the puddle realises that its universe is shrinking, along with the puddle itself.

Saturday 14 November 2015

woodstock

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings directs our attention in a thoughtful and expansive book review of graphic artist Chip Kidd’s recently published programme and kind memoir that imparts a great sense of reverence and goodness for the touchstones of Charles Schutz’ Peanuts characters.
The enduring success of the franchise comes about as perhaps for the humanities one of the longest running autobio- graphies and confessionals, Schultz claiming he was not only Charlie Brown but a little of every character, Snoopy included. Not only does feature explore the complexities portrayed with a sometimes conflicted and existential gang as only Schultz could create—a vexed bafflement on par with Hamlet serialised, but there is also a touching account of how the Peanuts reflected current events and fears over segregation in the States and brought in the character of Franklin in response.