I found this to be a really fine documentary. Haven't I seen it before? Some scenes seem quite familiar, and yet as a whole, I didn't recognize it.
Over on Facebook, I'm taking this opportunity to meditate on my own mortality. I'm but a year younger than when Wittgenstein passed, plus I've been watching lots about Walt Disney and Jim Henson, both of whom went rather suddenly.
They say our culture is in denial about death, doesn't handle it well. That's a cliche in a way. Why not turn the Halloween season into a time for embracing mortality. To say it "sugar coats" death is an obvious truism. What better excuse then, to add a dimension?
Regarding Wittgenstein's biography (above), I'm sure it seems dreary to many, given is ongoing depression, loneliness and suicidal proclivities. On the other hand, he lived through two world wars. The world itself was objectively a dreary one. He worked hard to make a serious contribution.
His story has finally come together in my mind. The fact that he became a recluse in Norway before the outbreak of WW1, is a detail I've always needed to pin down.
I've gone back to my Princeton days in some ways, when I focused on his later philosophy and wrote a senior thesis about it. I dashed out a kind of recapitulation of my thinking on Medium this afternoon.
I've been spending some hours in Lattice Gallery, as an apprentice to the maestro, Sam Lanahan, who is orchestrating a whole series of happenings and events. Flextegrity is the focus. My curriculum content has for some years capitalized on my having access to Flextegrity, in its various iterations, as an educational supply. You'll find lots on Flickr, as well as Youtube.
Glenn has an amazing collection of books, many of them on matters mythological and archeological. He's well versed in a lot of this material, and admires Sumeria especially. Therefore I'm smart to consult him as I continue to explore specific stories, looking for raw material for contemporary storytelling. These days I'm focused on the Pythians of Pytho (later Delphi).
New to Glenn's collection: an amazing science museum gift shop type tome, featuring a plastic tarantula presented in layers. As one turns the pages, the central spider is built, plastic parts fitting ingeniously into place, held to the pages by plastic. The whole thing is somewhat delicate. A rowdy kid, prone to throwing things or stepping on them, might soon destroy this work of art.
Regarding tarantula anatomy, I don't want to call it "simple" exactly, but it's a fine on ramp to the human system in any case. The heart is single chamber of that pushes blood by peristalsis (the way I think of it), whereas the lungs simply interleave hemolymph with surrounding air. The transport of oxygen is accomplished using a protein that's copper-based, instead of hemoglobin.
You may be wondering at my choice of topics here, a seeming blizzard of non-sequiturs. But then that's what hyperlinks are all about: providing context, where it might be needed. I've been looking at protein folding lately, rejoining the Linus Pauling generation in terms of my narrative. J. D. Bernal was a focus across two Youtubes. His lab was about using the techniques of crystallography to make headway on the problem of folded proteins (how does it work, what does it do?).
How I get to crystallography is through these "lattice meditations" (lattice in the sense of matrix and/or honeycomb) and all that somewhat Platonic geometry stuff I'm into. My work with Flextegrity is symptomatic of these fascinations.
I like that Wikipedia helped propagate the term "disambiguation" as indeed we have a need to disambiguated a lot of the time. From all the press given "machine learning", if you have that wired up with "AGI" (artificial general intelligence), you may be thinking we're on the brink of the Singularity. Or you may think more as I do, that a radio hasn't a chance of inventing radio, no matter how sireny the songs.
The science fiction world we each live in, really matters, to each one. But as a fish to water, so we are, to this ocean of ours. Expressing it is nigh impossible in some ways. That sense of a bubble with limits is still valid, however much we've turned to foams (cite Sloterdijk).
Perhaps your world features immanent AI takeover of human affairs. Or maybe it features old people suckering for expensive "we'll upload your intelligence" schemes. We've seen all these plots in the movies. I'm not suggesting either world is original in the sense of widely unshared.
I'm back to a full teaching load and want to give my Youtubes more time to just sit there and undergo fusion, or fission, or whatever metaphor. Translation: I'm not making one today. I've been on a roll lately, churning them out.
Am I positing a mental process out in rackspace somewhere? Not exactly.
I'm suggesting more stochastic energy patterns, thanks to random search engine activity, with researchers wanting to track down some supposed factoid.
That there's a stash of Youtubes on all that "Bucky stuff" already out there becomes known, whether watched or not. Nor is mine the only stash.
In my science fiction, we feature "grid talk" a lot, which includes appreciating California's commitment to open source (peer review).
Once a secretive security state thinks it's in charge, and responsible for covering up all hint of scandal, we've lost public oversight of a public utility. The open source liberal arts were not about altruism first and foremost, so much as omni-triangulation and integrity.
You don't want to put all your eggs in a no-bottom or weak-bottom basket.
I've been going over some of the Youtubes about the prospects for AGI in the future. What I look for is honesty about where we're at today i.e. I have little patience for hush hush "secret labs".
Regardless of where you stand on whether electronic circuitry might support consciousness, implicit endorsement of deliberately misleading science fiction doesn't look good in the rear view mirror.
I was awake at 7 AM to catch CBS Sunday Morning, which I'm not saying is my routine. I teased myself with the prospect of bopping over to Quakers', hopping on the 8:30 "slow-moving" (like a train, figuratively), an "adult discussion" (free-wheeling, worship-sharing format usually?).
I'm not one of the regulars these days. Loyal conductors see it through.
Speaking of loyal conductors, I caught the "exit interview" by outgoing DoD boss Mattis, an interview spread over two segments (commercial chopping block). He'd been a skeptic on invading Iraq but when you're part of the manpower, following orders is the rule.
He'd been at loggerheads with two "hat-shaped office" holders.
The "loyal conductors" of SMAD (Sunday Morning Adult Discussion) would include Marson and Wish for sure, and also our friend Richard. As we're of the liberal, unprogrammed persuasion (Quaker jargon) there's not as much interest in belief-system wheel-spinning during actual worship.
SMAD is a place to exercise a more systematic approach. We use Meeting to build strengths we'll need in civil society.
As things turned out, I caught the interview and then tuned out, turning to various other social media for continuity (and fewer commercial distractions).
A faction of the voting population plans on supporting Tulsi independently of CNN-DNC apparently, banking on her Wonder Woman appeal. I'm sensing "Russian bots" in the area, meaning an intelligentsia into ersatz samizdat has developed a keen interest in so-called "progressives" (always a volatile term of fuzzy meaning).
Speaking of words with fuzzy meanings, I mean to search for websites telling us whether ancient Egypt was more socialist or capitalist. Do we assume Rome was fascist then? I sometimes say "neo-Roman" with reference to some of the Manifest Destiny memes.
As I've mentioned previously, conducting debates in terms unlikely to hold persistent meanings, because historically not well-established enough, may prove too time-wasting. Risk assessment gurus keep testing the waters, regarding whether to brand as more socially responsible. The character of the various corporate personhoods is being tested.
GST (decoded elsewhere) looks to engineering and design science a lot more, leaving political science to get more inventive if that's what it needs to do. Customary namespaces have ways to provide continuity to their customers, while making room for noob discourses. Or maybe not so noob, just a bit other-worldly.
Speaking of other-worldly, Glenn Stockton and I had an interesting conversation about abduction stories in the UFO literature, over a couple IPAs at the local supermarket oasis.
For those of you just joining us, "Abducted by Quakers" is one of my jokey bumper stickers, with a Spaghetti Monster icon (perhaps in silhouette) in the background, connoting a "friendly to atheists" vibe. I'm also allowed to drink beer.
The "good without God" demographic is quite capable of Friendship we've found, including when it comes to the more ouija board parts (not a seance) wherein we allow for movements of the spirit.
Contemporary depth psychology has explained how "woo woo stuff" may still happen in a post Nietzschean world (i.e. strongly secular, with fewer fairies and angels). Jungians presciently predicted "abduction by aliens" episodes might become symptomatic. Today many abductees have their own Youtube channels.
