One of the things that's wonderful about this here internet is the ability to think of songs entirely at random and then obtain them immediately. One doesn't even need to know who they are by, if one remembers a snatch of lyrics. Recent songs like this for me (and I'm not saying I'm proud of this list. This is just what bubbles up) are Edelweiss,
No Different (by Sebadoh), and
Higher Love.
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06:48:14 PM,
Thursday 29 March 2007
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When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
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(1)
06:30:26 PM,
Thursday 29 March 2007
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talking at cross porpoises. (I get total bonus points for knowing that google would find me a cartoon of this).
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(1)
08:59:02 PM,
Friday 23 March 2007
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I dreamt last night that we had a staff meeting with penguins. The penguins were in a pool, swimming around, in the middle of the meeting area. We passed a fish-flashlight around to entertain them. There was also folk dancing. Also dreamt that Thich Nhat Hahn was an early leader in the speech recognition business-- there were leather-bound volumes of his collaborative works with some scientist. I'm not sure what my subconscious is on about but it seems cheerful enough.
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(1)
08:14:54 PM,
Wednesday 21 March 2007
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So I've been reading about emergence lately, which is this whole philosophical system where, to shear away all the defenses and make it simpler but possibly less defensible, there are several distinct levels of complexity, arranged hierarchically, of which the most recurring examples are matter, life, and mind (God slips in sometimes as well). It's supposed to be an alternative to materialism and dualism.
In any case, this led me to think about why people have such issues with materialism. I mean, think about it. Matter is supposed to be this stuff which lacks mind. That is to say, it has no experience of its own. Which is to say, it is totally and utterly alien to us. Completely ineffable. But for some reason, it is assumed that this ineffability is a lowly one. Whatever it means to transcend, matter does the opposite (is there a word for that?) I wonder if the debate would be simpler if people focused more on matter, why it upsets them to be matter (so ordinary! so subordinate! so blind!), and whether this conception of matter is even realistic.
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08:48:51 PM,
Sunday 11 March 2007
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OoCQotD: "Assuming penguins are hexagonal, how many of them are happy?"
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(6)
07:35:32 AM,
Wednesday 28 February 2007
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There are some hyacinths sprouting in a box in the fridge at work (I know they are hyacinths because the box says "Hyacinths". With a picture and everything. Very helpful). But my point is, every time I see this I think, "They called me the hyacinth girl". I have a similar problem with bluebells and a Babes in Toyland song ("blue bell, to hell"). When I see daffodils I don't remember any specific lines from the Wordsworth poem, but I remember the general sense of nausea. Would I like daffodils if it weren't for Wordsworth? There is no telling. It's a sort of pollution, almost, this mindless attaching of associations to perfectly good plants, like advertising on the moon (the moon? "her blacks cackle and drag". Sylvia Plath. Arg. Though that one doesn't pop up so much anymore).
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(1)
10:07:46 PM,
Sunday 25 February 2007
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As long as I'm quoting things here's one from Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind:
Whatever thinking can reach and whatever it may achieve, it is precisely reality as given to common sense, in its sheer thereness, that remains forever beyond its grasp, indissoluble into thought-trains-- the stumbling block that alerts them and on which they founder in affirmation or negation.
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(1)
08:36:47 PM,
Saturday 17 February 2007
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Tim and I had a good long conversation sparked off by this quote from Yukio Mishima's novel Spring Snow:
... if Chance ceases to exist, then Will becomes meaningless-- no more significant than a speck of rust on the huge chain of cause and effect that we only glimpse from time to time. Then there's only one way to participate in history, and that's to have no will at all-- to function solely as a shining, beautiful atom, eternal and unchanging. No one should look for any other meaning in human existence.
After some debate we came to a mutual conclusion. Philosophically speaking, determinism has everything going for it: it's consistent and it saves the appearances. Philosophically speaking, free will is problematic: we don't even know what we mean by it, or where the boundaries of the self that is supposed to have it are. However, choice is a fact, and responsibility is a fact, and free will (Tim would debate the "free" here) is therefore a fact: it's something we have to deal with. We can't argue our way out of it. It is not an illusion, but a certain limited human way of looking at things, which is useful in our limited human contexts. Although we can see that it is in a sense possible to transcend free will by understanding one's identity with matter and therefore with the universe, while this follows Reason, it is not in fact reasonable, nor is it advisable.
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(6)
08:31:27 PM,
Saturday 17 February 2007
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Notes taken on my jury service (pretty sure this much is legal to share!) (yes, I was very bored):
From the fifth floor of the courthouse, through a grimy window: buildings and trees, quiet; flags, tarps, waving; cars, small, gliding down a stretch of street to the rhythm of the traffic light, red, green, yellow, red. Occasionally, a bird. Below, a radiator, above, a blind, to one side, the blind's cord, and the shadow of the cord, parallel, not quite straight, but matching.
I look around at the waiting jurors, then return to the window. It's the solid form of the scene, punctuated by quiet movement, that makes it lovely. The reality of it. A photograph would be meaningless. These words are, in all likelihood, meaningless. Yet here it stands, my present world, or rather the distant, outside world presented to me in contrast with the jurors' waiting room, through a dirty window, and I have nothing better to do than write, so I write.
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07:55:50 PM,
Monday 12 February 2007
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In telephony there is something known as talk-off. This is where a person accidentally manages to sound exactly like a touch-tone telephone button (yep, that's two frequencies at once), thus issuing an unwanted command to the system.
Also, Windows Vista's speech recognition capabilities have a security hole. How? A malicious audio file could play and order your system about.
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(6)
05:48:27 PM,
Friday 9 February 2007
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This morning's silliness:
Why do fish fly?
To climb trees.
Why do ducks sit in trees?
To catch fish.
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08:49:50 AM,
Tuesday 6 February 2007
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Thoughts on The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh:
I know I've read this book before, a long time ago. I didn't remember that when I picked it up, but certain passages were very familiar to me: I think I must have read it when I was living in California in high school, in a rented house, in a room with a bookshelf full of fascinating things like a correspondence course in tarot reading and a journal of a somewhat older and more experienced young woman. It's where I learned meditation, an off-and-on habit I have had for years. It probably influenced me quite a bit, without my knowing it.
When approaching a book like Nhat Hanh's (any book of the advice-giving variety), it is important to remember that one has wisdom of one's own, and to stay grounded in it. The purpose of such books is not to replace one's system of thought and habit with something else, but to remind one of things one may have forgotten, and to nudge one's habits in the right direction. One should remember that the reality which Nhat Hanh refers to is equally one's own reality, and not just one's experience while meditating but equally while sitting irritable and nervous in traffic or in front of a computer screen at work. There's no point otherwise.
You know those moments of vertigo, when you suddenly realize, my God, this is the being I have been worried about, have been making plans for, have been chastising, this is it, right here! To me the purpose of mindfulness is to break through the bubble, gently, insistently, so it doesn't build up and burst suddenly like that.
I like the idea of contemplation of the nature of reality without hanging too much on concepts and philosophies. When I think about these things I argue, I make up strings of logic, because that is what I do, that is what I have been taught: that is my tradition. But I know my logic isn't going to convince anybody. It leads to statements which sound silly, like that rocks have consciousness (they do! in a manner of speaking...), which can be fun, but aren't really useful. One is trying to state the obvious, but the obvious keeps slipping out of one's fingers. Better to spend one's time keeping one's own grip on the obvious than trying to explain it, since it is of course equally obvious to others. (Though I still have this sense that getting my concepts lined up right should help somehow).
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08:08:50 PM,
Sunday 4 February 2007
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Today I spent six hours learning to write windows services. I was procrastinating, because I couldn't face the complexity of filling in a Word template. You think I'm joking.
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07:12:35 PM,
Thursday 1 February 2007
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The story on This American Life this week was so sad/cute/inspiring! (Available online next week).
About Ronald Mallett, who became a physicist because of his lifelong interest in making a time machine, in order to see his dead father.
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(7)
04:09:11 PM,
Saturday 27 January 2007
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Another good point from Tim: why don't people have two souls? Bilateral symmetry, you know.
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(1)
01:05:22 PM,
Saturday 27 January 2007
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Tim came up with the following bit of logic which I find utterly depressing:
seasonal affective disorder:humans::hibernation:cute fuzzy animals.
Therefore, when cute fuzzy animals hibernate, it's actually because they are having existential crises and don't want to eat or get out of bed.
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(11)
06:59:05 AM,
Friday 26 January 2007
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I had a dream about At Swim-Two-Birds. Except it wasn't really At Swim-Two-Birds, but a play claiming to be of At Swim-Two-Birds, but it really had nothing to do with it. There was a ruined house, with three books in the center of the rubble, one black, one white, and one grey. There was a man, and his sister. There were two nearly-empty bottles of wine. There was some music, "from the book", though not the song from the actual book. There was an argument over whether all of this was dadaist or not. I wish I could remember more because I think it was quite beautiful.
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(7)
06:28:49 AM,
Thursday 25 January 2007
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In the ocean there is a great daily migration from the bottom of the sea to the top. In civilization there is a great daily migration from homes to places of work. I like to think of the one when stuck in the other.
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07:00:40 PM,
Tuesday 23 January 2007
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I dreamt that I was carrying a pet sushi-- I was standing in line to enter it into a pet sushi show. But then it bit me and I woke up (in real life, the cat dug his claws into me).
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11:36:14 AM,
Sunday 21 January 2007
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You can't put ketchup on the Pythagorean Theorem!
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(4)
11:26:46 AM,
Saturday 20 January 2007
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I am such an NPR nerd. It's inescapable. Even rock bands I like are NPR rock bands. Seriously. We went to see the Dresden Dolls last week, and this week they were interviewed on All Things Considered. And going to see a Chekov play, well, that is like the ceremonial gathering of NPR nerds.
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05:07:39 PM,
Thursday 18 January 2007
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My church is about to hire an interim interim minister. You see, it takes months to hire a proper interim minister, who one must hire because it takes at least a year to hire a real minister. The committee to hire the interim interim minister is wondering whether to let the membership have a say in who the interim interim minister is. Unitarians are daft.
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(6)
05:44:56 PM,
Monday 15 January 2007
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I was very happy to see children on stilts today. Shows a proper parenting attitude, in these days when merry-go-rounds have been deemed a menace to society. It was in the same household that has a book exchange box. I got some J.D. Salinger short stories from it and left a Bill Bryson book. Haven't read the J.D. Salinger yet though.
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05:29:18 PM,
Friday 12 January 2007
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The pharmacy was late with my order. As a result I was forced to spend twenty minutes at a park looking at a sunset over a pond. I think in general I don't know my own interests: why didn't I think to do that on purpose? Also, there is a comet out there. There was a couple looking at it. I wasn't able to see it because it had gone behind a cloud.
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05:24:59 PM,
Friday 12 January 2007
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Also, Tim was throwing ice chunks at a frozen pond this morning and they made a wonderful space age poi-oi-oi-oi-oing sound.
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(4)
01:58:41 PM,
Friday 12 January 2007
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The cat's sleeping-on-my-laptop habit is becoming less cute: today, along with setting numlock and capslock on and making the printer dialog come up, he somehow managed to delete my music backup folder. That's nine disks of music I have to reload. Arg. Must remember to close my laptop. Must remember to close my laptop.
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(2)
07:38:28 PM,
Sunday 7 January 2007
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I've been thinking about what I said, and Nate's response, on this thread on Monadology. It's certainly true that Leibniz gets around what I was saying by letting each monad have properties and a soul. But that doesn't make the problem go away for me. My problem is really my own personal problem and doesn't have much to do with Leibniz, so I thought I'd move it over to my blog.
It started off with something that bothered me when I was reading Whitehead. He talks about eternal objects, which are fundamental properties that things can partake of, and gives as an example a particular shade of green. This bugged me because it seems to me that there is nothing fundamental about a particular shade of green. It seems to me, in fact, that the meaning of a particular shade of green is precisely the collection of objects which share this shade of green, and their relations with other things (so this shade of green would mean something different in a face or the sky than it does in a plant). But if I'm going to say properties are nothing but relations of objects, and objects have no properties in themselves outside their relation with other objects, how do properties arise in the first place? I mean, obviously properties exist, so there's something wrong with what I'm thinking, but it seems like there is some elegant way of solving it that I am missing, that doesn't involve having some arbitrary fundamental properties (or at least as few as possible).
Or, another way of stating my problem is: a thing is defined only in distinction from other things, but is meaningful only in connection to other things.
Or think about it this way: take an idealized abstraction of the brain. This brain is nothing but nodes which connect to other nodes, in a thick dense forest where roots are entangled with branches in a continuous mesh. It's not that it's not powerful, in fact it's Turing equivalent (I'm pretty sure. With the right assumptions anyway). But all it can physically do is make connections. Each node has a couple of different states in itself, but each node's importance lies in its relations to other nodes. Now it is easy to see how, given an outside world for input and output, one could design this machine to behave effectively or ineffectively, given some outside purpose. What is hard is to see how, internally, this machine's workings could have any meaning: could one tell, without reference to some outside, whether it was just a thicket of neurons or a real working brain? Or, another question: if the world is something other than a forest of connections, why is the brain so good at modeling it? But if it isn't, we have the same problem with the world as with the brain.
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(13)
07:26:45 PM,
Sunday 7 January 2007
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I wanted to say something about Chuang Tzu (the other ancient Taoist philosopher, besides Lao Tzu, writer of the Tao Te Ching), whose basic writings (translated by Burton Watson) I finally got around to reading. But I'm having a bit of a reaction like his character Kung-sun Lung: Now I have heard the words of Chuang Tzu and I am bewildered by their strangeness. I don't know whether my arguments are not as good as his, or whether I am no match for him in understanding. I find now that I can't even open my beak.. Tim challenged me to summarize a chapter, and let me tell you that is not happening. Here is a sample paragraph:
To use an attribute to show that attributes are not attributes is not as good as using a nonattribute to show that attributes are not attributes. To use a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using a non-horse to show that a horse is not a horse. Heaven and earth are one attribute; the ten thousand things are one horse
Ok, not all of it is that cryptic, but that will get you the sense of bewilderment straight away. Later on, after a paragraph on being and non-being, he says: Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. I don't know either, and that applies to the whole book. If it's not saying anything, it's not saying it in a somewhat fascinating manner. If it's saying something, I am at a loss to say what it is. It gives the appearance of a mighty grappling with trying to communicate something essentially unsayable.
There is something very attractive to me about this philosophy, especially Lao Tzu's form which I first read as a child and loved, but then again I am suspicious of the Way, I am suspicious of the Perfect Man or the sage, it seems they may be traps, that focusing on the Way or trying to become a sage is in some way antithetical to the very philosophy that is being expounded, or at least to my understanding of it. But probably they are well aware of that. I don't know. Shutting my beak now.
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(1)
10:17:56 PM,
Wednesday 3 January 2007
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Also, here is an interesting fact about triangles.
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10:40:52 AM,
Monday 1 January 2007
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We also went to the Institute for Contemporary Art, which was surprisingly excellent. Especially their current exhibition, "super vision", which featured works which played on your perception in clever ways. There was one work which was a bunch of reflective vases placed behind a one-way mirror, so you could see them reflecting one another in beautiful patterns. Another work, this one in the permanent collection, was a bunch of charcoal from a campfire hung by threads from the ceiling, ok I'm not making it sound like much but the effect is charming in a surprising way.
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(1)
10:40:04 AM,
Monday 1 January 2007
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The intransitive recordings show at first night was a quasi-religious experience. I don't know what it is about bands like Birchville Cat Motel, but they hit me someplace deep. I mean, you could say, it's just noise, and you'd be perfectly right. But they get the core of what's good about industrial music, and then take it somewhere totally different, somewhere just as dark but less angry, more serene. My only complaint is it was a bit too loud: being overwhelmed by sound is nice, but my ears hurt for hours afterwards.
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(2)
10:25:41 AM,
Monday 1 January 2007
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Not a bad day for bird sightings at Fresh Pond: A great blue heron, a golden-crowned kinglet (I think), and a flock of canvasbacks. And that's without bringing binoculars or looking terribly hard. Still haven't seen the supposed blue goose at our local pond that all the local birders are excited about.
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01:52:49 PM,
Friday 29 December 2006
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The Blue Man Group is disturbing. The audience participation is an exercise in social control. Makes it clear how fascism works. I think it would be highly amusing to get a group of people together, seed a show with them, and somehow subvert the show. I'm not sure what to do: it would have to be amusing enough to fit into the show, but it would have to clearly draw the locus of control away from the blue men for at least a few moments (to give the actors a challenge to improv to, is the point). I wouldn't actually do it (I hope I never have to live in a fascist state: I doubt I'd subvert that either), but I like the idea.
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(4)
01:56:39 PM,
Thursday 28 December 2006
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So I had this thought, to go look for educational filmstrips on youtube. I don't know why. It just seemed like the thing to do. Well, I didn't find much of interest in the way of filmstrips, but I did find a couple of educational videos about toes and feet. Think Koyaanisqatsi with a foot fetish. Odd. Thought I'd share.
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(1)
07:29:35 PM,
Sunday 17 December 2006
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So I got home from the beach today, and my computer was off. I thought, that's odd, I thought I'd left it on. So I rebooted, and odder still, all my settings were gone. My data was still there, but all my icons were in the wrong place, and firefox was treating me like a new user. Upon inspection, there was a folder named "iijjjj" where my settings folder should have been. All my settings were there, and it appears that by dragging everything into the regenerated Library folder, I have my whole world of settings back. Another folder was renamed to lots of V's and B's. My suspicion is that the cat took a nice long restless nap on my warm laptop.
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(1)
03:40:32 PM,
Sunday 17 December 2006
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