gathering vapors, dispersing precipitates

Our Friends With Benefits: On The Union Question | Unity and Struggle

At times control over capital in the form of means of production and the ability to purchase labor power has been spread out more or less among the classes over time, but the fundamental fact that capital in the form of dead labor dominates living labor has not changed. Selling labor for a higher wage …

Discussion with Alan Kay about Visual Programming | Don Hopkins

So it seems to me that there is a lot of room for new and different ideas for children's environments for learning powerful ideas. They have to be above threshold and in the spirit of real science and mathematics. Two cautionary examples are Interactive Physics and SimCity.The first assumes that Newton was absolutely right and …

Complexity Is Bugs

You could also say "complexity is a bug", referring to the complexity of a given solution that exceeds the essential complexity of the problem. The reasoning is that a "bug" is an instance of poor quality, translated concretely to someone's dissatisfaction. And excess complexity is a source of dissatisfaction to anyone seeking control over the …

Introduction to Ashtanga Yoga, Spring 2013 Syllabus

IntroAshtaYoga2013

Syllabus for Yoga Therapy, Spring 2013.

YogaTherapy2013

Bucky’s Law

THE LAW OF SYSTEMS Absolutely straight lines or an absolutely flat plane would, theoretically, continue outwardly to infinity. Intellectual comprehension occurs when patterns of experience return upon themselves in all directions. The difference between infinity and finity is governed by the taking of angular sinuses, like pieces of pie, out of surface areas a round …

Erik Davis – On psychedelics

After all, materialists and New Agers, sceptics and shamans, are all united in facing the death of ourselves and our loved ones — a process that remains, even for the most committed sceptic, a mystery poised at the knife edge of meaning and the void. And mysterious ordeals sometimes require mysterious protocols. via Erik Davis …

Organisation is Suppression

Organisation is suppression. It's more accurate to say that systems which avoid self-organisation whilst maintaining trajectories of productive innovation end up parasitically inhabited by organisms of all kinds, whether those organism are biological organisms, corporations or state systems. The history of life on this planet right through to Microsoft is of the successive suppression of …

Immanent Ethics

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (44). "After all this, do I really need to add that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future - and that they certainly will not just be free spirits, but rather something more, higher, greater, and funda­mentally different, something that does not want to be …

Bucky’s Giants

Each of the giants of today's great Grunch is a quadrillionfold more formidable than was Goliath. Each is entirely invisible, abstract, and completely ruthless—not because those who run the show are malevolent but because the giant is a non-human corporation, a many-centuries old, royal-legal-advisor-invented institution. The giant is a so one-sidedly biased abstract legal invention …

Poems from the Book of Hours (Rilke)

Do not be troubled, God, though they say “mine” of all things that permit it patiently. they are like wind that lightly strokes the boughs and says: MY tree. They hardly see how all things glow that their hands seize upon, so that they cannot touch even the utmost fringe and not be singed. They …

Camus’ Absurd Reasoning

"Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: 'tomorrow,' 'later on,' 'when you have made your way,' 'you will understand when you are old enough.' Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter …

ICLS & interdisciplinarities…

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‘open thinking’ vs fact-seiving

Instead of providing my boy with an extended opportunity to be curious, to imagine deeply and to think creatively, I reinforced one of the worst habits of our generation. I demonstrated to my boy that you can solve a problem without thinking. And, I won’t do that again. via Tips Up or Tips Down? | …

Bildung & Gestalt

pattern and Gestalt have become popular terms today in some branches of science, but we need to distinguish these terms, as they are general employed, from the "movement" or "gesture" we have been considering here. Goethe summarizes the matter this way: The German has the word Gestalt for the complex of existence of an actual …

Knowledge and Form

This is why art must be given particular credit for extending the world of knowledge. The semblances constructed through artistic activity can often teach a good deal about their originals, but, more importantly, they teach the viewer about the nature of his or her perceptual images. It is largely in artistic productions that our culture …

Apocryphalibrarians

Yet there is one point at which Frye’s literary and religious worlds do meet: both are in fact bibliocentric worlds. In his chapter [in The Anatomy of Criticism) on ‘encyclopedic forms’, Frye considers the Bible (Old and New Testaments) as a complete archetypal structure, and also as a compendium of all the modes, symbols, and …

Benjamin Peirce

I presume that to the uninitiated the formulae will appear cold and cheerless. But let it be remembered that, like other mathematical formulae, they find their origin in the divine source of all geometry. Whether I shall have the satisfaction of taking part in their exposition, or whether that will remain for some more profound …