Remember whatnow?

“Remember remember the fifth of November!”
But you seem to’ve already forgot.
Plot if you must, just ‘ware who you trust
’twas a snitch that got ‘em all caught.

Knowledge. Power. Freedom. (and other self indulgent fictions)

The Declaration of Internet Freedom

Is it a feckless display of entitlement from the privileged class that inhabit a realm of ideals beyond those to whom they grant no regard? Of course it is.

Will it achieve anything useful? Who knows.

Is it worth signing? Damn straight.

Knowledge was never power.

The freedom to seek, obtain, and to share knowledge; that’s power.

A power crucial to the equilibrium between any people that would claim themselves free, and the system they employ to govern it.

A power without which freedom cannot be said to exist, much less claimed.

A power which if denied constitutes nothing less than a declaration of war upon those that would seek to better themselves, to thrive, to learn. A war on freedom itself.

Mankind can claim no truly inalienable right bar one: the pursuit of such a freedom. It’s gain – and the gain of those myriad freedoms and powers it subsequently bestows are, and will be, the true gems of human achievement.

- The Metalogues

[Edit: Better. (via @quinnnorton)]

Now you science, now you don’t

I’ll admit, I love it when science and esotericism collide. I was fascinated by ‘unexplainable’ phenomena as a kid, and the interest has carried along through to adulthood – during which the advances in science and technology have been such that many of these can now be more closely examined, opening new realms of understanding. So when I saw the headline Scientific Evidence Proves why Healers See the “Aura” of People bouncing around on Twitter, I got a little excited.

 The initial link shared out by most hit Science Daily, but being a stickler for source info, I punched through the rabbit hole to the Alpha Galileo writeup, which provided references to both the University of Granada writeup (from where the info seems to have been originally pulled) and (finally!) the paper itself.

 Eager eyes ablaze, I cracked open the paper and skimmed the abstract for all those juicy facts and figures.

 Blah blah blah, photism, emotionally mediated synaesthesia, blah blah, The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar.”

 Wait, what?

 Surely there had been some kind of mistake. I mean, the headlines are pretty clear in their assertion that science had established a correlation.

I read through the research article, and sure enough, and while it references previous research that had established similarities, it also points out this research is contradictory, and it can be inferred (and later, in a sense, proven) that “the term emotionally mediated synaesthesia for the person–colour synaesthesia (on which the previous studies evidently found their conclusions) does not seem appropriate.”

 Back to the ‘aura readers are synaesthesic’ thing though.

 “None of these [aura readers] tested positive in the battery of synaesthesia or in the extensive interview. That is, they are not synaesthetes. They show neither frequent nor rare instances of synaesthesia.”

Pretty straight forward, right? Yet somehow the ’scientific media’ picked up the exact opposite view, so there has to be some kind of ambiguity down the line that confuses the matter. I kept reading

 “Contrary to the hypothesis put forward by Ward (2004), we found a number of notable discrepancies, suggesting that the two phenomena are not alike.”

Oh, ok then. A little further maybe? No, wait – here’s AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH REITERATING THE CONCLUSION COMPLETE WITH A HANDY DESCRIPTION OF THE LIKELY ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR AURAS.

 In summary, synaesthetes’ phenomenological experience seems to be qualitatively different from that of sensitives and clairvoyants. Claims made by people claiming to be psychic, or aura readers, can be alternatively explained by proven science. Duerden (2004b) shows how phenomena which arise as a consequence of the normal functioning of the human visual system can explain the purported direct experience of the aura. For instance, the complementary colour effect, which results from a temporary “exhaustion” of the colour-sensitive cells in the retina, could account for the presence of auric colours seen by a sensitive viewer when staring at a person. Staring at a darker object (a human figure) against a bright background may induce the perception of a bright “halo” around the object. This is due to a contrast amplification mechanism “built-in” to the human visual system, which allows for an efficient detection of edges. (See the original paper by Duerden, 2004b, for a detailed description of this and other optical illusions.) In any case, regardless of the plausibility of these scientific explanations of the aura, it seems clear that synaesthesia and the (esoteric) aura are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar phenomena which plausibly have different neurocognitive backgrounds.

 The UoG article, and those sites that regurgitated it, seem to have focussed solely on what has been provided as the ‘exception to the rule’ case given at the very end of the article:

 “However you can find mixed cases, like a very religious grapheme–colour synaesthete or an aura reader with some subtypes of synaesthesia. This is the case of Esteban ‘The Faith Healer from Baza’”

Not quite content to just mark down the aura story to shitty journalism, I sent an email to E.G Milan, one of the researchers of the synaesthesia/aura study asking if he was aware that his work was being misrepresented. Here’s the [edited] reply:

Hi, yes I am aware of it. It is a funny situation that is out of my
control. However probably I am guilty of it, only in part, because in my
discussion with journalists in Spain we have focus the attention just in
one single case, a famous santon from the south of spain who shows some
forms of synaesthesia (Esteban de Baza: we prepare a new paper about this
single case), overall mirror-touch synaesthesia. From that information
they have made an implicit generalization: all aura readers are
synaesthetes and despite my efforts to explain that synaesthesia is not
an illness or is not a power, some newspapers offers the version of
synaesthesia like an illness and the conclusion that aura readers are
crazy people and others the oppositte, that synaesthesia is a power and
then that esoteric aura is demostrated. You can not eliminate prejudices
against or in favor of a belief. For me it is an interesting test of the
relationship between survival of ideas and the role of data.  For me
things are complex  and I like to discuss about the possible origins of
some beliefs but we never made any afirmation about extrasensorial powers
like real or false. The ms is there.It is about the relationship between
forms of synaesthesia (heterogenous person-color synaethesia) and aura.

 

So. After recovering from the nhilistic despair this ‘meh, my bad, can’t be helped’ response briefly wrought upon my mind, body and soul, (and presumably aura, should it actually exist – not that a synthaesthesiac would be able to confirm that mind you) I got on with my life. It’s not exactly like someone being wrong on the internet is the end of world, right? And then the Universe did her ‘smack you in the face with serendipity’ thing, and threw this at me via Twitter:

EdYong209: Odd Atlantic piece: we need bullshit sci journalism to get the meaty “contrarian” stuff? No. Just get it right 1st time

The article itself describes the claim/counter-claim/investigate/debunk cycle around science news, and finishes by suggesting:

Without the borderline false headlines, we don’t get the contrarian debunking part [ohai!], which is when we generally learn what the research really says. Without the cycle we might not ever learn anything about science at all.

Well, after my brief little foray into this cycle, I can only say that perhaps it’s not just journalistic integrity that needs to carry the burden of responsibility of accurately representing scientific research, but in some cases, that of the researchers themselves. Although, as this Forbes piece demonstrates, sometimes even that may not be enough.

 

Unspeakably me

It seems clear to me that each of us can be said to speak a language entirely of our own, and of these that none can be said to be lesser than any other. For both voice and script are but vulgar and clumsy elucidations of that purest and most incommunicable of forms, thought itself.

Something From Something Something

Predictably (and cleverly, given how much I now want to read the book), this pushed a number of buttons, two of which I want to briefly discuss in detail.

The first:

‘But I don’t really give a damn about what “nothing” means to philosophers; I care about the “nothing” of reality. And if the “nothing” of reality is full of stuff, then I’ll go with that.’

Language is a thing. (See what I did there? Hold onto your britches, there’s bound to be more.) So wondering what exactly ‘thing’ meant – as opposed to what physics has supposedly decided it to mean – I went poking about the internet.

thing O.E. þing “meeting, assembly,” later “entity, being, matter” (subject of deliberation in an assembly), also “act, deed, event, material object, body, being,” from P.Gmc. *thengan “appointed time”

Breaking it down a little further:

-ing (1) suffix attached to verbs to mean their action, result, product, material, etc., from O.E. -ing, -ung, from P.Gmc. *unga (cf. O.N. -ing, Du. -ing, Ger. -ung). Originally used to form nouns from verbs and to denote completed or habitual action.

Now stick ‘th’ on the front of it (properly ‘Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ)’) and we start having fun.

Thorn

has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative [?], like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative [ð], like th as in the English word the.

both of which provide (yeah ok, maybe just me) a little amusement.

Theta (uppercase ?, lowercase ? or ?; [1] Ancient Greek ??? [t?ta]; Modern Greek ???? [?ita];

UK: /?i?t/, US: /?et/) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter
Teth . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 9.

image

Putting aside that 9 is probably the coolest number on the planet (see,that was another one – we just haven’t got quite far enough yet for you to know how hilarious it really was), from Theta we get this little gem:

In its archaic form [the cross within a circle] theta is used as a symbol for Earth.

and also as shorthand for

Thanatos (Greek: ??????? (Thánatos), “Death,” from ????? – thn?sk?, “to die, be dying”)

Now, this is a stretch (edit: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet), but the etymological jump to entropy there was simply too fun to not point out, particularly given:

the Egyptians used a symbol for Kosmos in the form of theta

a term which theologically (and by extension through Pythagoras is, ahem, philosophically)

used to denote the created Universe, not including the creator. […] also used synonymously with aion to refer to “worldly life” or “this world” as opposed to the afterlife or World to Come.

Check and mate. If you plan on postulating the superiority of physics over philosophy, perhaps it would be a good idea to use (or create) language more appropriate to your argument.

The second issue I want to point out is this whole ‘mathematics is the fundamental fundiment of everything’… thing.

So sayeth Krauss:

In the case of descriptive philosophy you have literature or logic, which in my view is really mathematics. Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics

logic can certainly be claimed to be a part of philosophy, but to me the content of logic is mathematical.

Continue reading Something From Something Something

The Heart Of War

The 25th of April

They herald the rising sun

Rememberence done

They go back – every one

To their bombs and their tanks and their ships and their guns.

 

“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

If ever an evil thing existed, it must surely be the madness named war.

In their rapacious pursuit of a moral or material conquest the fathers of war become the midwives of ruin, birthing abomination; dark progeny suckled on blood, tears, fear and terror – a festering and infectious blight upon the very soul of humanity.

There is no skill, no art to war, save that employed in convincing the would-be dead to march steadfastly to their graves.

Lest we forget.

Are Employers Really Thinking This Facebook Screening Thing Through?

image

[Image Source]

A story from Associated Press has been making the rounds this week about employers asking potential employees for their Facebook login credentials during interviews.

If you haven’t already, go read the article.

Iit’s rife with rage inducing nuggets of derpery that have set the privacy pundits ablaze, and for good reason, but there was one snippet in particular that I wanted to share:

since 2006, the McLean County, Ill., sheriff’s office has been one of several Illinois sheriff’s departments that ask applicants to sign into social media sites to be screened.

Chief Deputy Rusty Thomas defended the practice, saying applicants have a right to refuse. But no one has ever done so. Thomas said that “speaks well of the people we have apply.”

I wonder if ol’ Rusty (and any other employer, HR Firm or consultant who thinks this is acceptable) has considered that what this really says about those people.

These applicants are willing to compromise their personal privacy for the sake of a job they don’t even have. What reason is there to believe they’ll have no qualms compromising the sensitive information of your company and/or its clientele?

Now, IANAHRP. (Thank the gods.) I can tell you though, if it was my job to interview potential employees and something possessed me to ask for any of their personal login information, the applicants at the top of my list would be those that flat out refused.

Reflections On An Unpleasant Mind

Beauty was never in the eye, but the MIND of the beholder. If you can’t see the majesty in a single act of courage, a quiet word of pained reflection or the fearsome rage of an unbridled heart then I put it to you that your very mind is poisoned, your soul but a pitiful shadow of what humanity has shown itself able to be.

If there is to be judgement, let it be measured upon the appreciation of beautiful things.

If there is to be damnation, let it be only that which a lack of this appreciation bestows.

If there is to be mercy, let it that such unpleasant minds may not always be so.

It rhymes awfully better than #ozlog

1981, 81, 81 We’ll have an awful lot of fun with HR1981

Taken to it’s dark conclusion it’s a permanent intrusion (no of COURSE we won’t misuse it) but it’s not like we’re imposing on your right to own a gun

We’re protecting all the children by assuming you’re a crook (in another year or two we’ll catalogue your each and every look)

In the age of information you ARE the threat to all our stations so do right by your great nation and ignore that shadow son

It’s just the friendly and benign approach of 1981.

I am (Part 1)

I know, right?

I am the wind that whispers
Carrying voices long dead upon my wings
I am the silence of the moon reflected
From the surface of countless pools
My gentle touch pierces their their depths without trace
Without disturbance
I am the shelter and the storm
The rain, the shine
The seeing and the seen
I am the eagle soaring
And the prey on which it dives
I am the humble and the profound
The life that is given
And that which takes it back to whence it came
I am the sword and the arm that wields
My wrath is volcanic fury
Spewing havoc untold
The dying star that engorges worlds
The wave that pounds until the very mountains crumble before me
I am the dew suspended on the edge of ruin upon a single strand of fragile web
The weaver and reaper both
It is my name sung by the very bones of the Earth
By the howl of the wolf
The cry of the raptor
The mute ruminations of distant stars
And I who call it
I am the heart
The lungs
The veins
The very blood of all that lives
I am tenderness, I am rage
I am compassion, I am unmerciful fate
I fly
I crawl
I swim
I dig
I feast
And it is my carcass feasted upon
I am all that has past
And I am all that portends
All possibility is contained within and becaused by my being
I am fear, courage, love and hate
I am blessing, and I am curse
I am understanding, and confusion
I am Order and I am Chaos
I am the reason and the rhyme
I am the nature of truth
And truth is my nature
I am all, and I am none
For truth cannot be contained

Madness Descends

Said the cat to little Alice
“We’re all mad here!” 
Said Alice to that grinning beast
“Madness I don’t fear.”
Said I to the madness
“Just leave me alone!”
The Madness spake so: 
Never while you’re flesh and bone
“There’s a method to the mayhem?” 
Says the puppet to the string
The string says naught, 
Not a word, not a thing
“The end is nigh!” 
Says the prophet to the mass
The bloodshot sky
Nods agreement with a crash
An eye for an eye;
Breath stolen on a whim
Inspires doubt in all of us, 
You me her and him.
You needn’t fear the Darkness,
Bonnie lass, so wipe your tears
For the Darkness fears you and your innocence my dear.
So Madness descends
In it’s wake a kenning true
In all the world revolving
Nothings old, nothings new
All was once before
All will be again
All will be forgotten
All remembered in the end

Quantum of Solace: The Undertow

Remorse, regret, fear and ruin – melancholy made manifest, devourers of provident hope.

Romance, lust, joy and aspiration – a heart unbound, rampant and rife.

Love and grief, imbuing a certain narcissism, a subjective self reflection looked upon awkwardly by peers unable to empathise with the grievers lament, or the lovers bliss.

An oddity, is such a narcissism. Woe’d, we crumble. Bejoyed, we radiate. Both a faultless circumstance that need not be begrudged, a reaction to the temporal and spatial relativity of the object of our affection, yet both a cankle against the minds of those scratching out existence at less precipitous ends of the emotional coil.

These outlying emotions are to the picketed society a threat – to order, to rationale, to the constructed average of experience deemed as normal, as “healthy”, a perjurious reality most artfully conspired. Ironic that in these, the hours we seek solace from judgement, that we are most easily judged for daring to share such vulgar emotions. By accusing eyes placating comfortable frugalities such expressions of self — genuinely heartfelt pleasure or pain — are measured against inadequate conventions, arbitrarily dismissed as something other, something peregrine, something untrusted. A shared fear perhaps, of such experience on and beyond the fringes of temperance, of the slightest hint of fruitful chaos amidst such a painstakingly contrived notion of ‘order’.

And a fruitful chaos it is – what heights of art or science would have been attained had those that reached them simply been content with stagnation within a spirit of mediocrity? What achievements are yet denied by the merciless scurrying of the arbiters of temperance, the disengaged and dampened response of the cultivators of insufference, the ignorant wielders of lazy minds and false hearts? What greatness could we accomplish if given the mere freedom of sinking to the lowest depths of despair, of ascending the most dizzying heights of elation?

Weep now for tomorrow
For the tears not let to fall
A world without a sorrow
Is the cruelest lie of all

I AM – Part Two

I am elation
I am sorrow
I am yesterdays tomorrow
I am the golden sunshine
And the driving rain
I am the balm for your wounds
And the cause of your pain

I am the storm
I am the calm before
I am the tempest and the wreck ashore
Like a force of nature I’m the rising din
The very breath of Hades hot against your skin

I’m the boy that mothers warn about
I’m the one they all love to adore
I’m the one you never want to see again
I’ll leave you craving just a little more

Can you tell me why I struggle?
Do you know just who I am?
Maybe you’re the one I’m looking for
With these blinded eyes
And numb cold hands

Will you dance with me in darkness?
Will you bathe with me in light?
I’m really not that interesting
But I’m an arm to cling to in the chill of night

I am a new day breaking
I’m the setting of the sun
I am the perfect alibi
I’m the god forsaken smoking gun

I’m the flicker of the candle
The leaping shadow that it casts
I am the sum of all my sorrow
I’m every hollow beat of my bleeding heart

I am just what I am I say
But we all know that that’s a lie
I have fucking no idea
That’s the truth – cross my heart and hope to cry

What am I but what I am?
And just what that might be?
I’ll be damned if I’m not a holy man
But am I holier than thee?

I’ll let you crawl into my cradle
Then dig you an early grave
With your blessing I’ll be leaving
Back to the safety of my cave

This living gig is killing me
Said the sailor to the moon
But there’s no light for me to cling to
If I lay down in my ocean tomb

I am a father and a son you see
A brother, friend and more
So what am I unto myself
But a bitter new scar to settle the score

I was the boy I thought I’d be
The man’s still yet to know
So if you’d kindly pour another round
We can get on with the show

We’ll dance the dance of flowers
We will stretch our hands toward the sky
And when our blackened lungs run out of breath
We’ll lay right down and die

When our blackened lungs run out of breath
We’ll lay right down and die

The Quantum of Solace – Riding the Spectrum of Love and Loss

 Hi there internet. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Apparently I’m trying this whole ‘put a bunch of scattered ideas and notions into something resembling coherency’ thing again and here’s what came out first. Enjoy. Or don’t. It’s your screentime douchebag – do what you want with it.

 

The opposite of love has never been hate.

Once upon a time, a younger (and ergo, unwiser) me would have said that it was fear, but the grown up(ish) version has revised the theory somewhat. The latest rendition kind of came to me during a conversation about how so many of my favourite songs, those that just seem to dig into every fibre of my being like some kind of wayward organ coming home and reattaching itself to something vital inside my chest have the same, or at least similar chords. Yeah I know – it’s the ‘resonance’ thing, but that’ll be the only time I use the word, I promise. Besides, language does its thing and demonstrates these kind of ideas based on generations of contemporary conclusion. Do ‘Ring a bell’ or ‘Strike a chord’ ‘sound familiar’? Yeah, I thought so.

Right, on with it then.

So the opposite of love (I have decided in my supreme wisdom), is grief. Okay hold up now – before we get too much farther into this thing, you’re going to have to get up to speed on what exactly I mean by love. In a lot of ways, it’s kind of like autism. Yeah, I know. But still – pay attention.

The autism thing is (unqualified opinion caveat: “seems”) complicated, misunderstood and has the collected sciences scratching their boffinous heads in some way or another. There is one thing they tend to agree on however, that it is a spectrum of behaviour, upon which what we typically label as ‘autism’ sits, somewhere between aspergers and Mcauley Caulkin in ‘The Good Son’. Love? Exactly the same.

In Collin’s magical rainbow love spectrum, we can include the whole gamut of “OOH, ME LIKE” kind of emotional connection. <- Pay attention to that last word – it’ll be a recurring theme. So platonic friendship based on a mutual enjoyment of ferret hunting is a kind of (weird, but nonetheless) love. I’d consider this the weakish end of the spectrum, unless you both really, really like ferrets, in which case you could say it goes a little deeper. That compulsive, heart pounding, inexplicable “I’m going to tear all of your clothes off and bury myself inside your skin NOW before every blood cell in my body bursts into an auto-erogenous supernova of pure unadulterated desire I’d put somewhere toward the opposite end of that spectrum (Shutup, it happens. I’m told.) The deep kinship formed by lifelong friends and partners I’d seat in that solid (if terribly over-rated) normal/healthy/functional part of the spectrum and parent-child? Well, spit a clone through that whole damn thing and back out to and through the other side and you have a starting point for where that level of relativity begins.

Because really, that’s what it’s about isn’t it? Regardless of where on the spectrum two beings happen to sit, it’s how they relate to one another that defines where and how they meet. And paradoxically, how and where they meet on that spectrum goes on to define how exactly they relate. It’s a little metaphysical and really, really badly described but stick with it – I’m sure you’ll (ok, we’ll) find a point in here somewhere. The important bit is that the mechanics of attraction, reaction, repulsion and for want of a better term – emotional gravitation – remain the same. The players, and the contexts in which they move within this little biochemically fractal* environment change.

You click. You relate. You love. But this isn’t some static, vaccuumy environment we’re talking about here, this is life. The greatest fucking show on earth (to paraphrase Dawkins). Perhaps the object of your affection (which again, literally meaning ‘emotion, inclination, disposition; love, attraction, enthusiasm is in the grand scheme of things – well, this one anyway – contextually, a big deal) has changed. Perhaps you as an object upon that same relativistic scale of affection have changed. The change itself changes the relation within that tide of intrinsic emotional relations, one feeds the other, away or towards, hither, or thither. The objects change, so does the connection. The connection changes, so do the objects. Either way, your position on my little hypothetical rollercoaster of (somewhat badly described, for which I can only offer my apologies) emotive gravitational swell changes. Now assuming that, like most of us, you are a creature of habit, then that change will be at the very least a little difficult. There’s a natural resistance to the moving away bit for the safety of the emotional environment you’ve become comfortable with – that you’ve grown into. Some Darwin bloke postulated a similar thing a while ago about the passing on of certain physical traits that thrive in immediate environments. Evoluigi, or something. Anyway.

Grief.

Let’s say that you, or your counterpart has changed so much that that affection simply vanishes. It happened to me when they changed the seasoning on the KFC chips. Bastards. I got over it, but man – I miss those chips. Now, let’s scale up a bit and let’s say you lose – oh, I don’t know – the love of your life. Not the life itself, just the love bit. The object remains, but the relationship (or those objects within it) changes to a point where you simply feel… different. If that little survival switch is thrown, if for any of the plethora of reasons that are fired in such a situation you resist that change – enter grief.

Now let’s say for argument sake that grief is a spectrum of an intrinsically similar, yet exactly opposite nature to that of love. The closer the objects, or event perhaps (because I’m thinking the ‘opposite’ bit here means a switch to temporal, rather than spatial relations – or at the very least a symmetrical compensation of the two.) the more tightly bound the relationship between two points on that spectrum, the keener the grief. Time passes. People live their lives, the grief subsides. Antipodal – grief and love in this imagining are entwined, part of a self-regulating double-helix of human interplay. Feeding each other, and by each other’s hand fed.

 

When I was very young, I watched, and listened, as my best friend’s mother grieved her death. The sound of her keening was beyond mournful, like nothing I’d heard before, and like nothing I’ve heard since. It was a physical presence, this grief, an audible acknowledgement of the lack of someone – at once the most surreal, and most very, very frighteningly real thing I’d experienced in my young life. In much the same way, love achieves that same level of presence, be it [redacted for the sake of the less sexually comfortable amongst you and, let’s face it, a guy has to keep some secrets, right?] where the act itself becomes something tangible, something separate from the two bodies lying skin to skin, yet born of it.

And never, ever have I lived an experience more thick with emotional viscosity that when my first daughter was born. It was as if time slowed to a halt, the heartbeats of every person in that room pounded a staccato rhythm into my own chest, and every breath from every lung was mine to draw, ours to share. It was, and remains, the kind of thing that words alone cannot express. A subjective experience that like my friend’s mother’s grief, is wholly, entirely subjective***.

We have this tendency to moderate behaviour – socially, and individually – as if our lives, our society, and the world as we know it will scatter to dust if we cannot pinpoint and suitably fit every single life within it into some fanciful ideal of normalcy entirely irreconcilable to any accurate interpretation of the reality in which we live. To hell with that. This is life. Live it.

Love is about the connection. Grief; its loss.

In love, collide. Come together like the stars before you collided countless aeons ago to form the very earth on which you stand.

In grief, crumble. Don’t be afraid of collapse – no matter how many pieces you shatter into, you’ll come back together in the end.

And if you must sit somewhere in the middle, by choice or circumstance – either be prepared to come for the ride of your life as we zing on by, or get the hell out of our way.

 

* I do love to piss off teh scientists with made up terminology. No really – it’s pretty much what I live for**.

** Yeah, I know how sad that is. WAS I TALKING TO YOU?! SHUTUP AND GO BACK TO READING MY BRAINSPILL.

*** Yup, there’s a whole other comparison ripe for the making, and I ain’t touching it. Not this time, anyway.

Welcome to the neighbourhood.

The thoughts flit, a thousand fireflies dancing enswarmed above a fecund swamp of imagination, thick with the gurgle and chirp of ideas and haunted (always haunted) with predatorial doubts of self.

But life lives.

A caretaker, a parallel stream of consciousness born of the rift between breakdown and the onslaught of real and imagined profundities amidst the insipid encroach of an enlightenment that is most commonly anything but.

A blighted ferryman, eyes, hands, ears, nose and mouth gagged by the journeyers very flesh.

Entombed; mute, blind, deaf and impotent to determinative action, a puppet dancing a madman’s frenzied tune played out upon it’s strings.

P.

Of course there’s a part II, what are you, new?

A science should be defined by the questions it asks. Take for example technology science – it’s questions range from the challenges of engineering and configuring hardware to perform at ever changing optimums of efficiency (no doubt to an inefficient budget) to “How do I turn this damn machine on?”

The public is made of people. Some of these people ask questions. Some find answers. All ask questions that have been asked before and some few of these even find peregrine answers to these questions that are not always invalidated merely by the existence of an alternative conclusion.

I’m NOT a scientist, get me out of here too!

In a lot of ways, this sums something up for me:

“The origins of modern science probably date back to the 1600?s, when the first Learned Societies and Academies were formed, and the idea of using experiments to test theories took hold. There have been huge changes in many things since then – but it is interesting that the way that science is done hasn’t neccessarily changed all that much: we still make careful observations of the natural world; develop theories to explain it; build equipment to do more experiments to test our theories, and write scientific papers that are published in academic journals – sometimes the same ones that were around 350 years ago. One thing that has changed within science is that it is now a professional occupation (rather than simply a pastime for the wealthy or obsessive); and of course there are many more brilliant women scientists working in science than there were even as little as 100 years ago.”

This is sourced from The “I’m a scientist, get me out of here!” site which is (and let me make it clear that this interjection exists pretty much to balance out the additional length this took from a brief moment of ranty waffling) both an excellent idea and (and here’s the aforementioned ranty waffle) an awfully conceited demonstration of the (ever so subtle) holier-than-thou mentality responsible for the separation of science and the public in the first place. The ‘public’ began to resent science the minute ‘Science’ (with a capital damn S!) felt it was something apart from the core of its natura naturans.

To me, much of the same argument quoted above Unlogiccan be held to the complete history of human invention. From throwing rocks to applying observations of the natural world and developing theories that seem today mere superstition, human existence, the simple acquisition of experience and subsequent expression of curiosity was a science in the same way geology is a science. Those “pre-scientific” observations formed the very intellectual cornerstones of the contemporary scientific ‘machine’ self-notedly still grasping into vast expenses of unknown ground.

At least its not like one of those lesser respected scientific branches, like psychology, medicine or agriculture. Or even *shudder*… Astrophysics.

Whoa, I feel dirty just writing it.

(brb, cleansing brain with acid)..

Dots and Lines ptII

THIS POST DOES NOT EXIST YET IT’S JUST STUFF. WHY ARE YOU EVEN READING IT, GO READ SOMETHING SANE.

A web of a kind, but it’s weaved of goop. And some of that goop is INVISIBLE.

I get all bemusedly sucked in is the way people connect.

In order to explain how we connect, we seem to consistently subscribe to some form of reckoning of ‘Dots and Lines’. (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase entire schools of thought, over centuries of metaphorical representation encompassing the entire history of humanities attempts to intellectually grasp a comprehension of how it relates to itself and partially the means, modes and methods resultant from that conceded comprehension in a mere three words.)

Breath now. Good, asphyxiation averted.

These mental constructs of Dots and Lines serve a similar purpose to numbers, in that they are merely representing a concept; in the case of the number seven for example, the visual representation that is ‘the number’ itself doesn’t really matter, so long as the concept expressed is understood by those to whom the concept is being expressed. 7 is different to seven, yet any who have been trained (or can otherwise discern) these two completely different forms of expression (alphabetical and numerical) know that the concept is one of a count of seven individualities, of whatever nature the context dictates. If the context cannot be determined, the count itself becomes context.

Simple, but effective. In my school we were also taught expressions created by other cultures, the method – a whole other language.

Dots and lines are pictorial, making for the most ubiquitously recognizable depiction of, well – pretty much anything really. Yet they describe the complexity of such a anthropomorphic dependancy as the total and holistic sensory (tautoloslap!) and environmental experience of simply existing together with all a parallel logic to that which suggests that  picture of a circle indicating the ‘number’ zero articulates the concept of nothing.

Imagine each person a ball, influencing and being influenced by balls in every direction around them, from any direction. They have freedom, it that there is movement through a vast environment. Consider that not only do these representative spheres interact physically, but each ball emits certain characteristics that remotely influence the balls around them. These remote sensory emissions are received and by way of a highly complex processing system we do not yet fully comprehend are assigned value – merit or (?) and by the part of that valuation, subtly influence the deterministic behaviors inherent in each individual ball. These behaviors then in turn influence remotely balls which to which they have both physical and remote connection.

There are also created ‘lines’ of connection (or more properly, ‘communication’) that are created with the express purpose of conducting this method of connection. Many of these are static within the environment of our hypothetical multitude of spheres, and few of those vectors of informational traffic are accessible without transactional arrangements between individual spheres or specialised ‘spherecells’.(…) create, maintain and facilitate access to these vectors of connection, and some that are amorphous(?), and all of which – by nature of their design – are able to very nearly penetrate to any other sphere in the environment with access to them.

These and other routes of cofluence (zomg, buzzword.) create causual field of influence, more than the individually considered conscience a persuascience.

In a perfect display of informational retention, the input received from this perennial and omnidirectional field of persuascience (although persuascient field sounds so much cooler) this input can be used to fuel both externally exhibited behaviors, and the internal mechanisms driving the very cognition of these behaviors, which can be concealed from spheres around and percepitatively and when inhibited.

WYRD

It’s been a while since this was posted to it’s original location, which I’ve essentially abandoned, so putting it up here for posterity..

A story, I would tell you
If I may be so bold
Forgive the teller would you
It’s rather long – and old

A tale it is, of Kings and Queens
Of thieves and beggars too
Knights and castles have their place
As all the commons do

Of Merlins, Sybils, Gods and men
Of women and their young
Of labours done and fell to dust
Remembered only by the sun

Of Jesters and their antics
The burdens borne both ways
Of difference and of sameness
Of night and dawn and day

Of woe and wrath and ruin
Of injustice and appall
Surely too, of joyous mirth
Of triumph standing tall

Of war, of peace, advocates of each
The foes they stood against
Beaurocrocies, corruption
Of brief enlightenment

All of that we hold so dear
And all that we despise
Is echoed in this story
As is the odd surprise

Of grasping golden legacies
Inherited and made
The cost of blindly doing so
The tragic price that’s paid

Of ignorance and kenning
This tale will timely tell
Brutality, compassion
Cold chance’s part as well

‘Tis a grand old story
The one I’d like to share
But alas it’s ending;
For that I won’t be there

You see dear reader though the tale
Will tell itself in time
This short address of history
Is all of ours, not mine

Each of us has a part to play
Each our thread to weave
We come, we dance, we sing our song
And then it’s time to leave

The picture on a grander scale
Is shared by one and all
It’s what we have in common
Not a common view at all

We tell and we are telling
We take and give in kind
The tales of those around us
All influence our rhyme

Our ethics and our values
Our fortunes good or ill
Are all but ink upon the page
We’ve all in hand the quill

So write your little chapter
(for the task is none but yours)
And know the book grows heavy
Each page inspiring more

And if we could expand our scope
We’d find that book but one
Amongst the library of the stars
Their song – like ours – yet sung

So spin your web dear traveler
Your sparkling little line
It’s beautiful, of that I’m sure
As I hope you’ve found mine.

And should you be inclined to scoff
Your view on mine be terse
Recall ’One Song’, in older tongues 
Bespeaks a Uni-verse

The Board’s Prayer

The sullen dawn arises
From it’s coffin of nocturn
Await what new surprises?
Of what fresh suffering shall we learn?

Be good, bogan media.
P.