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2 Jul 2004 @ 04:36, by namakando. Philosophy
We should never ever attach material value to human life,each one of us is unique in our own special way with immense potential to construct and destroy(i recommend this as a good read:'The anatomy of human destructiveness'By Dr.Erich Fromm) More >
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2 Jul 2004 @ 00:19, by namakando. Activism
This piece i wrote to as an almost futile attempt to save FREEDOM PARK(our only nature retreat in KITWE).Therefore most of you might find it boring and a bit offish!!!It's just that it is so difficult to be heard by our local leaders here that when one has any issue that they need to air their views on they never make it.Which is sad don't you agree? More >
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1 Jul 2004 @ 22:36, by bushman. Science
Wow, is all I can say, and just think this spacecraft is going to be out there sending back stuff for 4 years and is going to launch a probe to land on Titan. Voyager got some great pics of Saturn's rings, but Cassini-Huygens has beaten all, we accualy sent this craft thru one of the gaps in Satrun's rings and entered perfect orbit 1 second later than predicted. Man, they are getting good at hitting the target, lol. My first impression I got from this pic was wow, what the heck could make chunks of rock and ice that varys in sizes from sand grains to houses, in a mixed state to look like that. It looks like a sound vibrations frozen in time, it may never be solved how the rings have such sharp edges. I think maybe there was moons that vacuumed it up and somehow was ejected later by something. One other thing about Saturn is that it has a perfect magnetic field, this basicly means its axis of rotation is the same as the magnetic north and south, and considering that Earth and Jupiter are the only other planets with a magnetic field except the rotational axis and magnetic axis are not the same. Maybe the rings of Saturn give its magnetic field some stability? This spacecraft also got a pic of Jupiter's ring when it passed by. What a huge step, and even Nasa admited last night during the insertion into orbit, that they will have to rewrite the science books with all the data they have been getting since it was launched. Well you will just have to surf thru thier site, that spacecraft got all sorts of pics and data on the way, including the sound of that huge solar flare last year. :}
[link] More >
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30 Jun 2004 @ 11:37, by skookum. Altered States
My Personal Monster
Sometimes a person can have an experience that really defies the things you’ve been taught all your life. Human beings are very prone to self-deception, and I am not immune from this malady. I have not recently been able to do much meditation or reflection lately. My life seems to have taken a hectic turn recently. I do, however, try to remember the lessons I have been taught. More >
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29 Jun 2004 @ 10:45, by jazzolog. Environment, Ecology
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
---Chuang-Tzu
The absurd is clear reason recognizing its limits.
---Albert Camus
Great is Mind. Heaven's height is immeasurable, but Mind goes beyond heaven; the earth's depth is also unfathomable, but Mind reaches below the earth. The light of the sun and moon cannot be outdistanced, yet Mind passes beyond the light of the sun and moon. The macrocosm is limitless, yet Mind travels outside the macrocosm. How great is Space. How great the Primal Energy! Still Mind encompasses Space and generates the Primal Energy. Because of it heaven covers and earth upbears. Because of it the sun and moon move on, the four seasons come in succession, and all things are generated. Great indeed is Mind!
---Zen Master Eisai
A female summer tanager
I observed myself talking to a young mockingbird yesterday. This is the time of June when new birds hit adolescence and start venturing on their own. He was rather closer to me than mockers ordinarily get, and so I just wanted to make sounds that would indicate that it's OK . Of course it's not OK, and what he really should learn is to fly for his life whenever a human comes near---but who among us who admire birds and love to watch them can bring himself to scare away a bird to verify its genetic instinct? We long to return to the Garden when birds and beasts frolicked with us...and all was innocent. More >
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29 Jun 2004 @ 01:33, by b. Religion
This story that I have been writing in this blog took place in the late nineteen sixties. I have skipped ahead of the last sections that I have written. I want to display an in depth conversation with L Ron Hubbard. Later in this story I become a member of LRH Commodore Staff, CS5-Ethics. Then I worked closely with L Ron Hubbard in his office every day and had hundreds of conversations with him. More >
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27 Jun 2004 @ 01:37, by ov. Ideas, Creativity
Debra was a very dear cyberfriend of mine who has recently passed on. Her online name was dawnis. I wrote these poems for her while she was still alive. She liked them. She was quite the poet herself. I miss her.
Faith in the Face of Disparity
Such is the nature of the times between
when old guard resort to unabashed force
trying to hold back a necessary dream
which chuckles and unfolds steady on course.
Beware the shadow projecting the past
a nightmare of warning rather than fact
as hindsight shows it simply cannot last
but as fertile soil for future extract.
Odd moments catch tears that release relief
ride the winds when not all is what it seems
silver wordless steam affirms your belief
when there is nothing left but primal screams.
Shining spirit light this path of strategy
salvation from nemisis and tragedy.
----------------------------------------------
Visiting Dawn Is Waking Up
I clicked into your poem
and then in the reading through
visited a friend I've known
from long since I've forgotten when
and although we've never met
in the memory it feels as if
we had gone somewhere together
and shared an experience
in time and place
those things it takes
to make it all come real. More >
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26 Jun 2004 @ 19:28, by ming. Education
Via BoingBoing, this is part of a eighth grade test from a 1895 Kansas schoolhouse:1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication. OK, it is just the Orthography section. Not that the other sections are much easier. What the hell happened? In case you don't get the point, here's a sample piece of an 8th grade test from a U.S. school today:11. What feeling does the author try to communicate about the topic?
A. serious
B. light-hearted
C. critical
D. silly
12. What question does this article try to answer?
E. Are Light Twinkies healthier than regular Twinkies?
F. Why do people like sugary, fatty foods?
G. Do Light Twinkies taste as good as regular Twinkies?
H. Why did the Hostess company invent Light Twinkies?
I'm not kidding. Most tests are multiple choice in the U.S. So, did major knowledge about education get lost, or were they really not as smart back then as it sounds like? More >
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25 Jun 2004 @ 23:19, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
Dark Jungles
I want to know you
my love
I want to know your dark jungles: dangerous, beautiful, and predatory More >
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25 Jun 2004 @ 12:06, by ming. Philosophy
In a comment thread, Sellitman mentioned this article by Charles Cameron about Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. Now, I had no idea what that was, as I hadn't even heard of his book "Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game". And, well, there's a lengthy academic treatise about how one might possibly construct a game that is described rather vaguely in the book. But it somehow stimulated my interest, and it seems to point to something important, albeit a bit beyond the horizon of comprehension.
Herman Hesse about a simple version of the game, which was apparently some activity he would engage in while raking leaves in the yard: "I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathedral of Mind." That sounds great of course. Now hear what Timothy Leary had to say:In the avant garde, cyber-hip frontiers of the computer culture, around Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, around Palo Alto, in the Carnegie Mellon AI labs, in the backrooms of the computer graphics labs in Southern California, even in the Austin labs of MCC, a Hesse comeback seems to be happening. However. This revival is not connected with Hermann's mystical, eastern writings. It's based on his last, and least understood, work, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game. This book, which earned Hesse the Expense-Paid Brain Ride to Stockholm, is positioned a few decades in the future when human intelligence is enhanced and human culture elevated by a device for thought-processing called The Glass Bead Game. Up here in the Electronic '80s we can appreciate what Hesse did, back down there (1931-1942). Hm, intriguing, but still didn't tell us what it is. Anyway, the author of the treatise inches closer with various examples and snippets of clues.The figure of Pierre Sogol (ie *logos*) in Rene Daumal's novel *Mount Analog* is clearly a Game Player. Sogol lives in an attic studio in Paris, and a pebbled path leads through shrubs and bushes and cactus plants around this studio:Along the path, glued to the windowpanes or hung on the bushes or dangling from the ceiling, so that all free space was put to maximum use, hundreds of little placards were displayed. Each one carried a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and the whole constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call 'human knowledge.' A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table of the elements, a key to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae, each planet and its characteristics, fossil remains of the horse species in series, Mayan hieroglyphics, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, samples of the principal plant and animal families, crystal specimens, the ground plan of the Great Pyramid, brain diagrams, logistic equations, phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies -- everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth-century Pico della Mirandola... Ah, the concept is beginning to form. It is a way of weaving together patterns, snippets of knowledge, symbols, music, art - everything"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created." Cool. A meditative mind directly accessing the cosmic mystery. Quanta of lucid comprehension and primal creation wowen together into universal wholeness. A system, a language for expressing and examing all of it. Playing complex patterns, no matter the media. Linking expressions of life in many dimensions, many senses. Synestesia. A passage from Hesse's book:Highest culture: the bead game in many categories, embraces music, history, space, *mathematics*. X is now the highest of bead game players, plays the world symphony, varies it according to Plato, to Bach, to Mozart, expresses the most complicated of things in 10 lines of beads, is completely understood by three or four, half-understood by 1000s. So, is it a language? Maybe. Bertrand Russell has this to say about creating ideal languages:The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples. A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols. In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol. Breaking everything down into its most simple components, in such a way that they easily can be re-combined or communicated or played.
Computers. The web. Everything is broken down into ones and zeros. Whether it is music, words, ideas, math, paintings, video, conversation, genetics. All come down to ones and zeros. And back again. And the possibilities for re-combination are endless. So does the web provide a substrate for this game? From the author:The Web allows the direct, digitized display of textual, musical, numerical and pictorial content, and thus provides the Game designer with a medium in which -- to take an example from one of my own Games -- TS Eliot's lyric "The dove descending" can be directly juxtaposed with Vaughan William's lovely piece, "The lark ascending". The counterpoint I am after is not simply between the two forms of words, although that is present, but also between the poem as it may be read aloud and the music as it may be played -- and beyond that, to the descent of the Paraclete on the disciples' heads in the form of flame and the rain of incindiary bombs on London during the Blitz, and to the English meadow lark and its prior celebration by Shakespeare and others.
I tend to think, then, of the Web as a kind of "board" on which the Glass Bead Game or its variants can be played, not simply in natural language but by the direct juxtaposition of ideas -- verbal, musical, numerical, pictorial -- in their own nature.
But in fact this is not what is going on. My presentation of Vaughan Williams' "The lark ascending" on the web is no more the piece itself as played than the Vaughan Williams piece is the lark itself as it ascends. On the web, a performance of the Vaughan Williams and a reading of the Eliot poem can be juxtaposed by rendering them into a common *digital* language... And it is this digital language which I suggest is in practice the appropriate analytic language for the design of Glass Bead Games. I don't know what he really did with those pieces of text or the music, but I get the idea, of how pieces can be brought together, juxtaposed, re-mixed, transferred between media, played in new ways. As he says, using the "web as an organ whose manuals and pedals can indeed range over the entire intellectual cosmos".
Too quick an answer to just let binary code be the magical symbolic language that can represent everything. Ones and zeros don't in themselves represent very much at all. Yeah, we can also split everything into sub-atomic particles, but that doesn't provide all the wisdom of how things combine and play in the universe at large. As a metaphor for having access to everything, it will work, I guess. But it would be a worthwhile venture to pursue the more full-featured abstract languages or pattern languages that might span a bigger and deeper range of life in one movement.It is this approach which my colleague Terence MacNamee is currently pursuing, searching in his own field of specialty, linguistics, for "a more formal kind of game where there really are structural isomorphisms that are purely intellectual and have nothing to do with events" by converting his old Master's thesis -- which is about the foundations of historical linguistics in the 19th century -- into formal structures for use in games.
I can see that the analysis of syntagms in language could establish isomorphisms between phenomena that are not otherwise related, such as:
(1) Ablaut in Germanic ("speak" vs. "spoke") (2) vowel harmony in languages like Turkish (a word must have all front vowels or all back vowels in it) (3) Semitic roots ("kitab - katab - ktab" - "writes - wrote - book").
The ramifications of this make me dizzy.
I intend, then, to work on these formal correspondences, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic, in the context of linguistics from Grimm to Saussure. The result will be a scholarly monograph which I hope to publish, and a series of games derived therefrom. Makes me dizzy too. Anyway, isomorphisms, yeah, that's good. Finding how things express certain deeper patterns, even if they might be manifested in very different media, and even though the superficial content might be different. A content and context and media independent language, facilitating the expression of infinite play. A poem from Hesse:The pattern sings like crystal constellations, And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole, And cannot be dislodged or misdirected, Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul. We've been drowning in information. We're on sensory and mental overload most of the time. The web plugs us into an ocean of information, pictures, sounds and bits in a number of media. So, now, the thought is there that we might deal with it all in different ways. There might be more wholistic ways of surfing. Seeing the waves and the ocean as a whole in motion, rather than as a whole lot of drops. Ways of comprehending large chunks at the same time, because we know the keys that tie them together. Seeing forests we didn't before know existed, because we couldn't fathom their trees or their leaves. Suddenly hearing the music of the spheres, once we know there are spheres. Tasting the soup when it dawns on us that it is a soup. If it is a game, I wanna play. More >
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