“I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what...
(The following is an excerpt from 'Contact' by Carl Sagan)
“Do Buddhists believe in God,...
From Apollo 6 comments41
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Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on...
Solve for X is a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. For thousands of years the imagination of storytellers has been a guiding light for people trying to change the world. In the last decade or two science fiction has almost fallen behind the work of...
from neurons to self
by Rodolfo R. Llinas
This essay arose out of a set of talks given at The University of St. Andrews
in Scotland, where Professor Glen Cottrell had graciously invited
me to give the American Alumni Lectures in 1989. Little did I know then
that St. Andrews would be back in my life, when, in 1998, my son...
Something from the Past-Future-Present.
"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my...
Smarter animals recognize themself in a mirror. Others see their reflection and act like its another animal. They hide their food, get ready for a fight, or run away for example.
Monkeys are smart enough to act based on where others are looking. They value 1 of 2 boxes higher if a person appears to value it, and more often choose to open that...
September through December 2010 was my first semester of education since I left high school in 2007. In one of my courses, Contemporary Issues, I wrote a paper (a very short one) entitled "Why Computers Do Not," which was meant as a counter to the hopelessly superior article by Marvin Minsky of MIT "Why People Think Computers...
In this book, I discovered one of the most inspiring (fore)words in the area of BRAIN SCIENCE that swiftly explain consciousness as if it never represented much of a problem. I am sure you will enjoy.
"Modeling Phase Transitions in the Brain"
Editors: D. Alistair Steyn-Ross · Moira Steyn-Ross
Early in the 19th century debates on...
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. --Albert Einstein
E usually does not equal M C^2. Thats only when its not moving.
The USA government learned that terrorists keep more secrets and try to have more privacy than people who are not terrorists. Therefore secrets and privacy are bad, so the USA government proceeded to build...
Sensation and Forces
"Not to reproduce what we can already see, but to make visible what we cannot" (Paul Klee)
The task of art, in all its forms, is to capture forces. Deleuze and Guattari say that this, ultimately, is what makes art abstract - the "summoning" and making visible of otherwise imperceptible forces (Deleuze...
The Elements and Movements in Bacon's Paintings
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions" (Sir Francis Bacon)
Deleuze distinguishes 3 pictorial elements in Bacon's paintings, which together constitute a highly precise system - the field that is the spatializing material structure, the...
Painting, Its Ways and Faces
"The adventure of painting is that it is the eye alone that can attend to material existence or material presence [...]" (39).
Deleuze relates to two definitions of painting - one by line and color, which is visual, and the other by trait and color-patch, which is manual. He then proceeds to...
A Short Introduction
"If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it".
(Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 144; in O'Sullivan, 5)
Though it may not have been recognized as such at the time of its publication, today, The Logic of Sensation has come to be recognized as one of...
In the chapter titled Author as Producer of Walter Benjamin's Reflections, he introduces Sergei Tretiakov's 'operating writer', and how his/her mission, as opposed to the 'informing writer', is "not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively". This description is of the author not as activist--because...
Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in...
I wrote this post last December but didn't publicly post it here. I don't why, other than I immensely hate facebook, I was ranting and thought I'll keep it to myself.
But, appearing in this past year, there are already solutions to what I perceive to be internet problems (ie CargoCollective, Behance Network and Google Wave are three...