The awakening to the mystery of life is a revolutionary event; in it an old world is destroyed so that a new and better one may…

“The awakening to the mystery of life is a revolutionary event; in it an old world is destroyed so that a new and better one may take its place, and all things are affected by the change. We ourselves have become mysterious strangers in our own eyes and tremblingly we ask ourselves who we are, whence we came, whither we are bound. Are we the being who is called by our name, whom we thought we knew so well in the past? Are we the form we see in the mirror, our body, offspring of our parents? Who, then, is it that feels and thinks within us, that wills and struggles, plans and dreams, that can oppose and control this physical body which we thought to be ourselves? We wake up to realize that we have never known ourselves, that we have lived as in a blind dream of ceaseless activity in which there was never a moment of self recollection.”

–J.J. Van Der Leeuw fromThe Conquest of Illusion (George Allen& Unwin), 1951. FromParabola, Winter 2007:“The New World.” (viacrashinglybeautiful)

Gas roils around inside galaxies, forming new stars; it blows out of galaxies for its own hot reasons; it hangs around outside…

“

Gas roils around inside galaxies, forming new stars; it blows out of galaxies for its own hot reasons; it hangs around outside the galaxies, cools off, and falls back in to form more stars, then blows back out again, in, out, over and over. It’s like the galaxy is breathing.

This is sheerest anthropomorphism, which is a bad word among scientists. They don’t like it – neither did my editor — because it describes in human terms, something that should be described in its own terms. Thinking anthropomorphically, you’ll probably miss what the thing – the galaxy, the virus, the moving magma – is actually, truly doing.


But it was the breathing that got me — and breathing not anthropomorphically either, not in human terms but in its own terms. So what looks like anthropomorphism, the universe described in human terms, is really humans following the rules the universe follows. One of those rules is cycles — infalls and outflows, repeat repeat — that nourish some entity through time. Until sooner or later, somehow or other, the gas leaves the galaxy and doesn’t fall back in, and the stars burn up the remaining gas until it’s gone. When the galaxy can’t breathe any more, it dies.

That’s another of the universe’s rules: entities end. Humans, we’re so cosmopomorphic.

”

–Cosmopomorphism
By: Ann Finkbeiner (viam1k3y)

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It stands 3.5 metres tall and is 5.5 metres long (11ft tall by 18ft long), suggesting it may have been a male that weighed up to…

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

It stands 3.5 metres tall and is 5.5 metres long (11ft tall by 18ft long), suggesting it may have been a male that weighed up to six tonnes. The skeleton, which is 30,000 to 50,000 years old, was estimated to command a price of between £150,000 and £250,000. It had been in a private eastern European collection for years and was only assembled, including tusks, for the first time when it came to the auction house. Errol Fuller, the curator of the sale, said: “Although mammoth are not as rare as some dinosaur skeletons, the chances to buy an almost complete skeleton don’t come up very often. We had interest from private buyers as well as institutions from around the world and there was bidding going on between buyers in the sale room and on the phones.” The lot was offered at the auction house’s second Evolution sale, where a giant egg from the extinct elephant bird was also offered. A Chinese museum was the successful bidder paying £69,960 for the egg, which is more than 30cm in length. It had been expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000. Elephant birds were akin to giant ostriches and were native to Madagascar. They have been extinct since at least the 17th century. At the first Evolution sale, in November last year, a diplodocus skeleton named Misty sold for £400,000. It was originally bought anonymously, but the Obel Family Foundation later revealed that it was the purchaser and was donating the skeleton to the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen. (via Woolly mammoth skeleton fetches £189,000 at auction | World news | The Guardian)

You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on…

“You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible. Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia, you know. My young people’s vocabulary… their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse. Well, do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?”

–Junot Díaz,Art, Race and Capitalism (viazerosara)

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be…

“Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.”

–Rebecca Solnit,A Field Guide to Getting Lost (viasigned-olivia-tiffany-soga)

Now a new analysis of the dial used to predict eclipses, which is set on the back of the mechanism, provides yet another clue to…

“

Now a new analysis of the dial used to predict eclipses, which is set on the back of the mechanism, provides yet another clue to one of history’s most intriguing puzzles. Christián C. Carman, a science historian at the National University of Quilmes in Argentina, and James Evans, a physicist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, suggest that the calendar of the mysterious device began in 205 B.C., just seven years after Archimedes died.

Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device’s eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the “epoch date,” or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism’s calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.

The finding supports the idea, scientists said, that the mechanism’s eclipse prediction strategy was not based on Greek trigonometry, which did not exist at the time, but on Babylonian arithmetical methods borrowed by the Greeks.


Over the years scientists have speculated that the mechanism might have been somehow linked to Archimedes, one of history’s most famous mathematicians and inventors. In 2008, a group of researchers reported that language inscribed on the device suggested it had been manufactured in Corinth or in Syracuse, where Archimedes lived.

But Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 B.C., while the commercial grain ship carrying the mechanism is believed to have sunk sometime between 85 and 60 B.C. The new finding suggests the device may have been old at the time of the shipwreck, but the connection to Archimedes now seems even less likely.

An inscription on a small dial used to date the Olympic Games refers to an athletic competition that was held in Rhodes, according to research by Paul Iversen, a Greek scholar at Case Western Reserve University.

“If we were all taking bets about where it was made, I think I would bet what most people would bet, in Rhodes,” said Alexander Jones, a specialist in the history of ancient mathematical sciences at New York University.

Dr. Evans said he remained cautious about attempting to identify the maker at all.

“We know so little about ancient Greek astronomy,” he said. “Only small fragments of work have survived. It’s probably safer not to try to hang it on any one particular famous person.”

”

–On the Trail of an Ancient Mystery
Solving the Riddles of an Early Astronomical Calculator (viam1k3y)

New York City has unveiled a plan to replace its 7,302 pay phones with wireless internet hubs that will offer amenities…

dead media

hyperallergic:

New York City has unveiled a plan to replace its 7,302 pay phones with wireless internet hubs that will offer amenities including free Wi-Fi, free domestic phone calls, USB chargers, and, naturally, advertising space that is projected to generate enough revenue to not only pay for the ambitious project, but also bring the city an additional $500 million in the project’s first 12 years. Dubbed LinkNYC, the network of wireless “Links” is due to be up and running by the end of 2015.

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Today, consumers buy kitchen appliances, and then take them home and do whatever they want with them. But if that product is…

“Today, consumers buy kitchen appliances, and then take them home and do whatever they want with them. But if that product is “connected,” chances are it’s been pre-loaded with someone else’s idea of what a person should be doing with it. And no matter how well meaning that someone else is, when the objects we own contradict us, that’s going to be a frustrating experience.”

–(vianew-aesthetic)

Cyberpunk and Empire

*That was a pretty good analysis from a dozen years ago, and now it explains why “fiction” about cyberpunk is irrelevant.  It’s no longer  ”aesthetic vision,” it’s everyday  lived experience.

Cyberpunk and Empire

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
DePauw University/ Science Fiction Studies

(…)

Nonetheless, I think we can safely identify certain aspects of cyberpunk’s aesthetic vision common to all its examples.

1) “No Future” (the punk in cyberpunk) – the sense of a collapsed future, i.e., the replacement of progressive modernism’s sense of constant material and social improvement by the sense of a failed project, leaving behind ruined infrastructures as its Ozymandian monuments;

2) the replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated, but ethically savage, private, capitalist corporations and cartels, which dissolve social protections and rule of law, while encouraging the ruthless black- marketization of high technologies;

3) the attendant involution of all political power, and with it, the abandonment of all social centrality – hence the tolerance for poverty and decay of social institutions, law, traditional concepts of human dignity, and collective purpose;

4) the street finding its own uses for things – the proliferation of diverse fractal societies and cultures relatively free to construct their own social contracts under the radar of dominant institutions, politically powerless and hence unconstrained by normativity, but potentially destabilizing of the infrastructure of dominance because of their various technical “hacks”;

5) posthuman evolution – the morally unfettered proliferation of technologies (especially cybernetic and biotechnical prostheses) into areas traditionally considered sacrosanct, and, as a result, the gradual transformation of all natural phenomena into artificial ones constructed by human or cybernetic agents.

These might well be considered the characteristics of postmodern Empire. (…)

(via @brucesterling)

Cyberpunk and Empire

Spooks generated by brain-body mismatch

ghosts, haunting, hauntology, robotics, perception, experiment, OBE, neurology

The results show that not all types of spookiness emerge in the same way from the brain. “They show that the neural networks involved in the feeling of a presence are not the same as those involved in out-of-body experiences or in seeing a doppelgänger,” says the lead author of the study, cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL).

http://www.nature.com/news/spooks-generated-by-brain-body-mismatch–1.16294