Art has reached an impasse for sure. Or rather, art that has ever been selected for a gallery or a museum has a natural ability to deliver nausea. Maybe it's because I'm such a carnivore of aesthetics, but there is such a thing as too much harmony. Nature provides the most visual symphonic harmony, and artists by the laws of color matching attempt to imitate. But with the Singularity coming up, it's time for humans to stop congratulating themselves for how well they can mirror, imitate, or represent the *.* experience.

Anyways, this all relates somehow to the design of Philosophistry. I feel like I'm at a passion-impasse. Everybody likes the current design for obvious reasons. This is making me nervous because I can also simultaneously feel that it's not doing too much for me as well.

So, in honor of Che and my newfound (sarcastic) interest in "Rage against the machine" there'll be a new, braver design for Philosophistry coming up that will risk being as ugly as possible. I might also make it an ode to .PNG and CSS. Cheers!

Maybe 2012 is not too optimistic

When Jackson Pollock splattered his brush, he marked a shift in art: from determinism to non-determinism.

From structure to chaos.

Blogging is kind of an extension of that RE writing.

The question: is the shift from control to un-control a signal of the Singularity? When the primary modes of order have been wrested from the creative, magical minds of man and placed in the hands of codeified fomula, rules, and science, does that mean that the torch of progress is being handed to another species?

Of course it does! Thank you... good bye!

Maybe 2012 is not too optmistic

If the mind is a road COMMA then most people have medians and painted lines to keep them from losing their way PERIOD

I COMMA on the other hand COMMA seem to have no such defenses SEMI-COLON no walls and blockades to keep me from the gutter PERIOD

If the mind is like water COMMA then the usual amount of thinking I do in a day is like a raging avalanche PERIOD

One of the biggest floods for me are these metacognitive infinite loops PERIOD I get lost thinking about thinking about thinking PERIOD START-QUOTES to control, or not to control QUESTION-MARK Can I even ask that question QUESTION-MARK Should I QUESTION-MARK Where does my action come from QUESTION-MARK END-QUOTES And then I get stuck COMMA like a car in the mud PERIOD

But fortunately COMMA there is time DASH DASH and time DOES cure everything OPEN-PARENTHESIS as does laughter CLOSED-PARENTHESIS

Can you succeed at something by choosing to not succeed? Uh.... listen... here's my scrap sheet of that idea.

Is it possible to change your metric of success in order to succeed better by those metrics? Does that even make sense?

Read more if you want to see this confusion manifest.

I found a huge resource on interesting stories and issues summarized by big thinkers.

Slate gets all giddy about Amazon.com's new "search books" feature..

What is the purpose of search engines..

We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one.

When you search, you already have an object in your imagination. Therefore, Google is more of a memory-retrieval aid and supplement for the global and individual mind. As for discovering new information? I like StumbleUpon's approach.

If Google has mastered the process of retrieving the past, and if Blogger has mastered the meditation on the present, what tool will master the future? StumbleUpon is a nice start, but I see an opporunity here.

Also, if Google tries to use personalized results as a way of suggesting things you might like as a feature of its "search," it will clutter this... since Google is rarely used for "surfing" and more for reference.

When it comes to business, Steve Jurvetson has continuously been a source for inspiration for me. He's young, thrice graduated from Stanford, blazingly rich, and articulate. But these kind of "golden" guys are a dime a dozen it seems, especially with all the dot-com gazillionaires.... What distinguishes him is how clairvoyant he seems with his understanding about everything... he has smarts in a Buckminster Fuller sense.

His two most recent filmed visits to Stanford, while not telling me things in specific new, summarized and synthesized everything into a coherent vision for the business-technology future. Watch his most recent archived lecture here. Consider it an executive summary for Age of Spiritual Machines. At the very least you'll get high by the speed at which he talks.

.. "The United States imprisons more people for drug violations than the European Union imprisons for all causes combined, and the E.U.'s population exceeds the U.S.'s by a hundred million" (The New Yorker, October 27, 2003)

Slate tackles the beatification of Mother Teresa by describing her as a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

Referenced within that article is Orwell's essay on Ghandi which is attempting to add some dirt to the ultra-rosy picture the public carries about him.

but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful.

As a teacher your goal may be to inspire humility and wisdom, so it's nice to invoke readily accessible characters like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

...

Both articles draw their criticism along the lines of how these people's dogma (Teresa's anti-feminism, Ghandi's ascetism) and possible narcissism should make imperfect the perfect sketch drawn up by history.

Gene Pool for your PC

Control your own little artificial gene pool. This app provides you with a digital primordial soup where swimbots compete with each other for food. Manipulate seetings to see how the bots evolve through mating preferences. I just downloaded it and I think it's a briliant concept. (by way of Gavin Nog)