6/18/2008 02:43:00 AM 2008-06-18 Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, 183; Fieldwork with children and computers is rich in examples of the kind of fright that Minsky expects. For example, an incident where it was evoked by a first contact with recursion is reported in Sherry Turkle, The Second Self. Interviews with adults on early experiences also reveal many such memories--fear of prisms, of mirrors reflecting mirrors, fear of questions such as "How far away are the stars?" 3/05/2008 02:21:00 AM 2008-03-05 Preposition A word or phrase placed typically before a substantive and indicating the relation of that substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, as English at, by, with, from, and in regard to. 2/19/2008 08:27:00 PM 2008-02-19 Border transfer - edge transfer Border transfer - edge transfer 10/25/2007 09:30:00 AM 2007-10-25 One thing after the other. One thing after the other. 9/14/2007 03:01:00 PM 2007-09-14 Cargo/Frontier Cargo/Frontier 7/08/2007 03:17:00 PM 2007-07-08 Default time/clock collection Default time/clock collection 5/04/2007 12:10:00 AM 2007-05-04 Demarcating Boundaries; There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers 4/29/2007 08:23:00 PM 2007-04-29 Hyper-solid homage to the artifical (Artfice); "I am reminded of Roland Barthe's essay on seventeenth-century Flemish painting, on obsessive tactile materialism, what he calls 'the world as object in itself'." 4/04/2007 11:49:00 PM 2007-04-04 Simulacrum; The simulacrum on the far side of the screen towers of the everyday, not as its representation, but as its mythic model and truer self. 4/04/2007 11:49:00 PM Crash; The crash would appear as the emblem of an unarticulated desire to return to a “primitive” regime of “symbolic exchange,” to a relation of fluidity and ambivalence, between the domains of the living and the dead, and incompatible with operation criteria. 4/04/2007 09:02:00 PM Language; The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a good language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., "a," "the," "I") should be shorter than less common words (e.g., "benefit," "generation," "mediocre"), so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise—e.g., a passing car—the listener should still be able to glean the meaning of the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory. 3/14/2007 02:53:00 PM 2007-03-14 Spatiotemporal Effects / Curtis Roads; The IR of a room contains many impulses, corresponding to reflections off various surfaces of the room--its echo pattern. When such an IR is convolved with an arbitrary sound, the result is as if that sound had been played in that room, because it has been mapped into the room's echo pattern. 3/07/2007 07:37:00 PM 2007-03-07 Massumi on brightness; Fogs: actual traces of the virtual are often light effects. Although we tend to think of the perceptual dimensions of light as clearly distinguishable and almost boringly familiar, they are not so docile on closer inspection. [...] The boundaries we set and distinctions we function by are habitual. According to many theorists of vision, they do not replace the infinitely complex perceptual fog that is our originary and abiding experience of light. They occur with them, alongside, in a parallel current or on a superposed abstract perceptual surface, in a perpetual state of emergence from the continuum of light-dimensions that one frustrated would-be tamer of visual anomaly termed “the brightness confound.” / The “brightness confound” can become a conscious percept, through a concerted effort of unlearning habits of seeing, or through a simple accident of attention. When it does, the confound is contagious. It strikes depth: three-dimensionality, argues the “ecological” school of perceptual theory, is an effect of complex differentials of surface lighting played out in ever-shifting proximities of shadow and color, reflectance and luminosity, illumination and translucence (it is not, as traditional theories of perception would have it, the product of mysterious calculations of relative size and distance--as if the eyes could count). / Depth is a surface effect susceptible to the brightness confound. When it goes, so goes separable form. Not only do the relative size and distance of objects flutter, their boundaries blur. They cease to be separate figures, becoming not entirely localizable zones in a fuzzy continuum. In other words, they cease to be objects, becoming what they always were, in the beginning and in parallel: fluctuations. Visual runs. Experiential transition zones. The distinctions of habit fold back into the always accompanying level of the more-than- three-dimensioned light concurrence from which they emerged. The fixed boundaries and “constants” of our habitual perceptions are emergences from an experiential confound to which they can return, and must return. For they are not in the final analysis structural constants at all, but continually regenerated effects, predicated on the variation they follow and emerge from, as its perceptual arrest. They rest entirely on variation. 2/28/2007 07:01:00 PM 2007-02-28 The Optical Unconscious; The answer explains the reference to the "fixed stare" in that Ruskin cannot take his eyes from the "sea" and "the sea is a special kind of medium for modernism." How so, the implied reader wants to know, and the answer is that the sea is "a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, the no-space of sensory deprivation." So the sea is a sort of ready-made monochrome, or perhaps a natural analogue to an all over blue painting, or perhaps to the oblong luminosities of what Rosalind Krauss elsewhere designates "The California Sublime." Or in any case for what she designates here as "the optical and its limits," where a certain kind of positive nothingness is in fact what one sees. 1/29/2007 11:47:00 PM 2007-01-29 Present-tense - One could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a "slow" verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly so as to appear static. 1/29/2007 11:38:00 PM Boomerang - http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Serra-Richard_Boomerang_1974.mp4 "As an example, let us consider the Latin verb 'videre', meaning 'to see', which is used in English in such forms as 'video'. We then introduce the root verbal form 'to vidate'. This does not mean merely to see in the visual sense, but we shall take it to refer to every aspect of perception including even the act of understanding, which is apprehension of a totality, that includes sense perception, intellect, feeling, etc. (e.g., in the common language 'to understand' and 'to see' may be used interchangeably). So the word 'to vidate' will call attention to a spontaneous and unrestricted act of perception of any sort whatsoever, including perception of whether what is seen fits or does not fit 'what is', as well as perception even of the very attention-calling function of the word itself (...)" 1/24/2007 08:58:00 PM 2007-01-24 David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram"; "Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange....[by] paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for 'real' to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights." 1/18/2007 01:02:00 AM 2007-01-18 Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments; There is something irresistible about such a place, something grand and empty. This kind of architecture without "value of qualities," is, if anything, a fact. From this "undistinguished" run of architecture [...] we gain a clear perception of physical reality free from the general claims of "purity and idealism." Only commodities can ford such illusionist values [...] As the cloying effect of such "values" wears off, one perceives the "facts" of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy. 1/05/2007 01:16:00 PM 2007-01-05 New Totalities; The new totalities, or transcultural ensembles, that can be envisioned in the near future in the place of "collective identities" issue from the processes of self-differentiation maturing into interferences. In this case differences strengthen our need for each other: Some of our differences are neutralized (in order not to become oppositional), others are intensified (in order to avoid group identification). Interference is what we perceive as the joy and play of communication that reinforces some of our differences and neutralizes others in the play of non-totalitarian totalities. Generally, totality can be developed in two directions: (1) as opposed to difference and therefore eliminating all particular differences, as in a totalitarian state; (2) as truly different from difference and therefore preserving and nourishing all particular differences, as in an interdisciplinary community. \ These new totalities will shape the transcultural world, which has not yet received any satisfactory theoretical articulation. Deconstruction may prove methodologically inadequate to this emerging class of totalities that could be detected as transcultural communities, or as transmetaphysical systems, as trans-utopian visions, or as transsocial groups. Deconstruction operates through the theoretical differentiation of existing unities while what is in question now is the new integration of differences, the construction of trans-differential cultural, social, epistemological totalities. 12/28/2006 11:06:00 PM 2006-12-28 Tron; "Every one of us is in that computer somewhere, whether it's because of out drivers license, social security, or income tax. But the fact is that there is an alternate person that is an electrical person that is forming inside this electrical dimension. And then the question is, 'Are you in control of that information, or is somebody else in control of it?' When thinking about Tron, you sort of have to picture yourself inside a Pac-Man game. Picture yourself in there fighting for your own life, and the only way you can get out of that game is if you figure out how it works from the inside this time. The big difference is the game doesn't look the way it looks to you from this world as a little screen. This time it looks real. What happens in Tron is that the character that Jeff Bridges plays, a guy named Flynn, has invented these various video games, and they've been taken away from him illegally by a large computer company. In an effort to release the information from their computer files, he takes on their computer system. In so doing, he gets pulled into the computer. Once he's in the computer, he gets sentenced to die as a video game player by the Master Control Program. The irony is that those video games are his creation and now his life depends on overcoming his own creation." 12/24/2006 12:32:00 PM 2006-12-24 Heat Death & Homogeneity (New Totalities) If the universe lasts for a sufficient time, it will asymptotically approach a state where all energy is evenly distributed. "That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." 11/24/2006 01:46:00 PM 2006-11-24 Collected and Edited [...] 11/23/2006 10:09:00 AM 2006-11-23 The three leitmotifs which the exhibition is exploring were introduced - Is modernity our antiquity? ("it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead."), What is bare life? ("Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure.") and What is to be done? ("Today, education seems to offer one viable alternative to the devil (didacticism, academia) and the deep blue sea (commodity fetishism)"). 11/23/2006 10:05:00 AM Yason Banal 'Disaster But Disco' - Can you explain a little about the performance element of tonight? What the two half naked tattooed men are doing and your role in it? The performance tonight is quite important, at least to me personally, as I haven`t presented my body 'live' for quite some time. Usually what I show are traces of my performance via photography, video and sculpture, or if done 'live' employ other people/bodies instead. The two guys in the performance resemble sculptures; they are not actors. It continues my interest in masculine stupor and awkward figurines, as well as sleepwalking as an in-between state between reality and the subconscious, stillness and action. Visually, the black strip of electric tape on their eyes and headphones on their ears are very similar to the 'straight' guys you see appearing on amateur Japanese porn. I find this fascinating - the Japanese notion of outer and inner realities (I forgot what they're called) - blocking out 'disasters' and other disturbances to norm, and living in a sort of fantasy 'disco' land. I think its also dangerous, because there is little acknowledgement or tolerance of certain deviations and ideas. 11/08/2006 01:28:00 AM 2006-11-08 On Anticipation: In artificial intelligence, anticipation is the concept of an agent making decisions based on predictions, expectations, or beliefs about the future. It is widely considered that anticipation is a vital component of complex natural cognitive systems. As a branch of AI, anticipatory systems is a specialization still echoing the debates from the 1980s about the necessity for AI for an internal model. In 1985, Robert Rosen defined an anticipatory system as follows: A system containing a predictive model of itself and/or its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model's predictions pertaining to a latter instant. 11/05/2006 10:06:00 PM 2006-11-05 The World's First Successful Prediction of the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD) - Alleviate Social Loss Caused by Floods and Drought: Frontier Research Center for Global Change (FRCGC) Climate Variations Research Program of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC; Yasuhiro Kato, President), after leading the way for the world to discover Indian Ocean Dipole Mode Event (IOD *1) in 1999 which causes global abnormal weather, is working on to clarify its generating mechanism as well as performing model experiments using the Earth Simulator toward IOD prediction since 2005. Research Group (Hirofumi Sakuma, Group Leader; Swadhin K. Behera, Sub Leader; Jing-Jia Luo and Sebastien Masson, Research Scientist) led by Toshio Yamagata, program director, with the use of the advanced ocean-atmosphere coupled general circulation model called SINTEX-F1, which was developed under EU-Japan collaboration, succeeded to predict IOD event of 2006 fall from the November of 2005. Through reproduction experiments of past IOD events it is understood that the IOD events are usually predictable 4 months prior to an event. But predictions much earlier have become possible now after the world's first successful prediction of the IOD by the Research Group. A part of this achievement is going to be published in the Journal of Climate of American Meteorological Society. We will continue to help in improving climate predictions by enhancing sparse observational network in the Indian Ocean and by making further improvements in the model and model initialization processes. Such a prediction system will alleviate natural disasters all over the world by sharing our advanced predictions through climate information network. 10/29/2006 04:39:00 PM 2006-10-29 Alternative DNS roots; DNS Server becomes an island when a domain controller points to itself for the _msdcs.ForestDnsName domain 10/26/2006 12:31:00 AM 2006-10-26 A clue to the multiplicity of directions: Comment s'en sortir', by the French philosopher Sarah Kofman: "Poros refers only to a sea-route or a route down a river, to a passage opened up across a chaotic expanse which it transforms into an ordered, qualified space by introducing differentiated routes, making visible the various directions of space, by giving directions to an expanse which was initially devoid of all contours, of all landmarks. "To say that a poros is a way to be found across an expanse of liquid is to stress that a poros is never traced in advance, that it can always be obliterated, that it must always be traced anew, in unprecedented fashion. One speaks of a poros when it is a matter of blazing a trail where no trail exists, of crossing an impassable expanse of territory, an unknown, hostile and boundless world, an apeiron which it is impossible to cross from end to end ... the sea is the endless realm of pure movement, the most mobile, changeable and polymorphous of all spaces, a space where any way that has been traced is immediately obliterated, which transforms any journey into a voyage of exploration which is always unprecedented, dangerous and uncertain." 10/23/2006 12:19:00 AM 2006-10-23 This to That, Figure to Ground; The rectilinear grid is composed of points and consequently lines; a pragmatic means to partition space or standardize elements in space. Because of its numbered nature it too approaches infinity in all directions. It becomes a field; a distribution. This is a sudden shift from its pointed, lined nature to that of something more ambiguous; undifferentiated vastness. It presents problems for what could be called the figure, or object. The discrete is impossible when faced with a field. It might serve better to think of the discrete anomaly then as moments of increased “thisness” or “thatness.” 10/10/2006 08:22:00 PM 2006-10-10 Identity; Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are not logically or metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus." That is: to say that two things are "the same" obscures the difference presupposed by there being two things in the first place. 10/04/2006 12:48:00 AM 2006-10-04 David Bohm on event/moment "We begin by noting that current relativistic theories in physics describe the whole of reality in terms of a process whose ultimate element is a point event, i.e., something happening in a relatively small region of space and time. We propose instead that the basic element be a moment which, like the moment of consciousness, cannot be precisely related to measurements of space and time, but rather covers a somewhat vaguely defined region which is extended in space and has duration in time. The extent and duration of moment may vary from something very small to something very large, according to the context under discussion. As with consciousness, each moment has a certain explicate order, and in addition it enfolds all the others, through in its own way. So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it 'holds' all the others enfolded within it." 10/03/2006 09:19:00 PM 2006-10-03 After-image After-image 8/27/2006 01:06:00 PM 2006-08-27 via r-echos / socialfiction Three notes about some aspects of this project (there is a lot more to imagine from it though!): / 1. it is presented as an echo of the immediate history of software and discourse about software (”A blogject is one of those things that has a certain kind of blogger thinking about.”), into the author’s own non-conventional ideas and references. grassroots AI and applied software criticism. / 2. where does a website start and end? how notions like “being inside” and “being outside” works on websites? There are obvious external limits to a website, a link to a different domain leads “outside” of a given website. A website can also be identified as a unique set of similar page thanks to a certain similarity of style, this gives a senses a being inside a website and going “outside” of it when you see pages with different templates. / Using a “limited memory” could be a way to create an internal definition of the extension of a website: we would reach its limits not only because we step inside something else, but because there is no more of its own space. / 3. being a software writing tool, it defines its basic units of writing (”text is stored as a chain of segments”) and test rules for semi-automatic editing. 8/21/2006 10:25:00 AM 2006-08-21 Red on white. Tyo. Red on white. Tyo. 8/12/2006 02:46:00 PM 2006-08-12 Abstraction / Simulation "Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory -- PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA -- it is the map that engenders the territory ... It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own." (Jean Baudrillard - Simulations) 7/09/2006 11:14:00 PM 2006-07-09 RE: Color and visual strata / discreteness and resolution - "most notably it was predicted some 20 years before verification that marine fish that live just above the aphotic zone would have only one pigment, and that that one pigment would have a maximal sensitivity down around 450 nm (for us light at this wavelength would appear blue)." How would this tie in with visual strata in representing color as an informational entity? 7/07/2006 08:02:00 PM 2006-07-07 Potential Titles "Possible Center," "Possible Hole" 5/27/2006 12:54:00 AM 2006-05-27 Diffusion Tensor Imaging "Diffusion weighted imaging uses the diffusion of water molecules to probe the directional micro-structure of living tissue. A single diffusion weighted image generally measures diffusivity of water molecules along a particular direction. The amount of diffusion along a direction is detected by destructive interference of different phase signatures created by the magnetic gradient." Correlations with weather data, (specifically "Window") [pdf]http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://spl.harvard.edu:8000/pages/papers/martha/DTI_Tech354.pdf&e=9797 4/11/2006 10:16:00 PM 2006-04-11 information "information exchange is the ONLY way to ever get real change." Throbbing Gristle - Re/Search Magazine 1982 4/09/2006 09:45:00 PM 2006-04-09 maximum entropy probability distribution In statistics and information theory, a maximum entropy probability distribution is a probability distribution whose entropy is larger than (or equal to) that of all other members of a specified class of distributions. If nothing is known about a distribution except that it belongs to a certain class, then the maximum entropy distribution for that class is often assumed "by default", according to the principle of maximum entropy. The reason is twofold: first, maximizing entropy, in a sense, means minimizing the amount of prior information built into the distribution; second, many physical systems tend to move towards maximal entropy configurations over time. 3/21/2006 04:04:00 PM 2006-03-21 Via Abstract Dynamics "Through out her writing danah constantly invokes a bottom up defense of youth culture. Essentially that the kids are alright they just need space and privacy to develop their own identities. It's an argument I'm totally sympathetic to, but it becomes completely problematic when one realizes that something like MySpace just isn't a traditional bottom-up youth culture situation at all. Rather it's something more like an engine, a structure to contain the bottom up energy and transform it into something else entirely." _TheirSpace 3/20/2006 11:28:00 AM 2006-03-20 The following hexadecimal data are the random bytes you requested. These data were generated by the Fourmilab HotBits radioactive RNG F641C991D61D9245B7B3D3B08D5F2C0A11934A6B8EBB24C045985C17A6A7FA62- CFA1C984E4B65A012703CC5735069902E40D469E6316856286E42F02407F56DC- 3984C75FF2E5E1ADA51AF8C14B412799BAEC498C645866D2E7C3583168ACB7F7- 5D101C4629775FC199E2330442454B88726256E56BE79BB3B239A28057F702BF 3/20/2006 11:22:00 AM Instrumental Reason: Thinking out possibilities And from noise: possibility, potential (and locate virtual [on the superiority of the analog]) Digital as numerical codification; Digital is possibility 3/20/2006 11:20:00 AM To be looked at: compression and noise Via Diehard test: "C:\Program files\ENT>ent xored.bin Entropy = 8.000000 bits per byte. Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 410820608 byte file by 0 percent. Chi square distribution for 410820608 samples is 243.08, and randomly would exceed this value 50.00 percent of the times. Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.5014 (127.5 = random). Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.141694679 (error 0.00 percent). Serial correlation coefficient is -0.000020 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0). C:\PROGRA~1\ENT>" 3/07/2006 05:05:00 PM 2006-03-07 1+2+3+4+... "I do not like that presumptuous Philosophy which in its rage of explanation allows no xyz, no symbol representative of the vast Terra Incognita of Knowledge, for the Facts and Agencies of Mind and matter reserved for future Explorers." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- via Crystalpunk manifesto "Concepts are wild (fuzzy) horses." - Joan Watson 2/16/2006 05:50:00 PM 2006-02-16 title "syntax.reticular.info" 2/16/2006 05:03:00 PM sound => space "Modern building technology as well as building economics have indeed shown almost total disregard for the fact that human beings need rooms with good, "live" acoustic qualities. I am not talking about technical means of sound proofing and the like. Take the following solutions which are typical for our civilization: people are buried in rooms built out of concrete, and at the same time we are developing highly sophisticated stereo and quadro hifi technologies to allow some sounds to come alive in these spaces. In all the theory of modern architecture we find very little or nothing about the relationship of sound, space, and body. The main concern has been, as we all know, to use architecture and town planning as a means of resolving social conflicts and problems. But even this effort was essentially dominated by the powerful hostility with which the Enlightenment regarded the human body." http://www.bernhardleitner.at/en/ Acoustic Resonances of Ancient Structures http://www.inbetweennoise.com/ 2/06/2006 04:04:00 PM 2006-02-06 Norman White on Mistakology Every technology has its mistakes and accidents already built in. This insight is not new, but it is still consistently ignored in an approach to technology that demands it to be controllable and safe, functional and useful. Technical dysfunctionality is 'repressed' by modern society, in a Freudian sense. Functional discrepancies between people and machines are called 'human failures' even in cases in which the technology is making impossible demands on its human user. Machines and their mistakes are thus an inexhaustible source of humour and parody. 1/26/2006 07:11:00 PM 2006-01-26 Flavin "... the title adds a whole new dimension to the work, referring as it does to a branch of medieval metaphysics called nominalism and specifically to the writings of the 14th-century Franciscan scholastic and philosopher William of Ockham. Ockham held that abstract concepts such as immortality can only be apprehended by faith, not by reason. He also said that if there were many explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest was the right one to use. You can see what attracted Flavin to his writings." 1/24/2006 12:48:00 AM 2006-01-24 Random physical phenomena Many modern random number generators attempt to use some form of quantum-mechanical noise, widely considered to be the gold standard for randomness. (For a discussion of empirical verification of quantum unpredictability, see Bell test experiments). Some phenomena used include: * A nuclear decay radiation source (as, for instance, from some kinds of commercial smoke-alarms), detected by a Geiger counter attached to a PC. * Atmospheric noise, detected by a radio receiver attached to a PC * Thermal or quantum-mechanical noise, amplified to provide a random voltage source. A favored source of noise is avalanche noise generated from a reverse-biased zener diode. The thermal noise from a resistor can also be used. One approach is to convert the noise source into random bits in a separate device that is then connected to the computer through an I/O port. The acquired noise signal is amplified, filtered, and then run through a high-speed voltage comparator to produce a logic signal that alternates states at random intervals. Care must be taken when amplifying low-level noise to keep out spurious signals, such as power line hum and broadcast transmissions. In some simple designs, this logic value is converted to an RS-232 level signal and sent directly to a computer's serial port. Software then sees this series of logic values as bursts of "line noise" characters on an I/O port. More sophisticated systems may format the bit values before passing them into a computer. Another approach is to feed an analog noise signal to an analog to digital converter, such as the existing audio input port available on most personal computers. The digitized signal may then be processed further in software to remove any bias. Some have suggested using digital cameras, such as webcams, to photograph chaotic macroscopic phenomena. A group at Silicon Graphics imaged Lava lamps to generate random numbers. U.S. Patent 5732138 One problem was determining whether the chaotic shapes generated were random -- the team decided that they are in properly operating Lava lamps. Other chaotic scenes could be employed, such as streamers blown by a computer's exhaust fan or bubbles in a fish tank (fish optional). The digitized image will generally contain additional noise resulting from the video to digital conversion process. One commercial product, Quantis from id Quantique SA, exploits an elementary quantum optics process, sending photons one by one onto a semi-transparent mirror. The mutually exclusive events (reflection - transmission) are detected and associated to "0" - "1" bit values. Perhaps the most common approach is to use precise timing of the interrupts caused by mechanical input/output devices, such as keyboards and disk drives as a source of randomness. Done carefully (as in, for example, the Yarrow algorithm), enough entropy can be collected for the occasional creation of cryptographic keys and nonces. 1/24/2006 12:31:00 AM Apparent Randomness Randomness coming from the environment (for example, brownian motion, but also hardware random number generators) Randomness coming from the initial conditions. This aspect is studied by chaos theory, and is observed in systems whose behaviour is very sensitive to small variations in initial conditions (such as pachinko machines, dice ...). Randomness intrinsically generated by the system. This is also called pseudorandomness, and is the kind used in pseudo-random number generators. There are many algorithms (based on arithmetics or cellular automaton) to generate pseudorandom numbers. The behaviour of the system can be determined by knowing the seed state and the algorithm used. This method is quicker than getting "true" randomness from the environment. 1/24/2006 12:26:00 AM Accident(s) An accident requires that the event in question was unforeseeable, unlikely or unpredictable. A criticality accident (also sometimes referred to as an "excursion" or "power excursion") occurs when a nuclear chain reaction is accidentally allowed to occur in fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. This releases neutron radiation which is highly dangerous to surrounding personnel and which causes induced radioactivity in the surroundings. 1/24/2006 12:23:00 AM Uniform Distributions The uniform distributions (continuous) are probability distributions such that all intervals of the same length are equally probable. Uses of the uniform distribution In statistics, when a p-value is used as a test statistic for a simple null hypothesis, and the distribution of the test statistic is continuous, then the test statistic is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1 if the null hypothesis is true. Although the uniform distribution is not commonly found in nature, it is particularly useful for sampling from arbitrary distributions. 1/24/2006 12:20:00 AM Randomness Randomness should not be confused with practical unpredictability, which is a related idea in ordinary usage. Some mathematical systems, for example, could be seen as random; however they are actually unpredictable. This is due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions (see chaos theory). Many random phenomena may exhibit organized features at some levels. When working with probability, it is often useful to run experiments such as computational simulations. Many programming languages have the ability to generate pseudo-random numbers which are effectively distributed according to the standard uniform distribution. 1/12/2006 08:31:00 PM 2006-01-12 Manifold A manifold is a mathematical space which is constructed, like a patchwork, by gluing and bending together copies of simple spaces. For example, a circle can be constructed by bending two line segments into arcs which overlap at their ends and gluing them together where they overlap. The motivation for working with manifolds is that you begin with a relatively simple space which is well understood, and build up a manifold, which may be very complicated, from copies of that simple space. By choosing different spaces as base material, different kinds of manifolds can be constructed, such as topological manifolds and differentiable manifolds. 1/12/2006 01:59:00 AM via Cinema 1 Deleuze: "Philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object...So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves 'What is cinema?' but 'What is philosophy?'". 12/30/2005 12:21:00 AM 2005-12-30 Statistically Improbable Phrases Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. 12/23/2005 01:10:00 AM 2005-12-23 Re: Volcanic civilizations The Minoans: Feared the bull, living symbol of the god of the Earth. "The bull dance." Was likely destroyed by a tidal wave caused by one of the largest volcanic explosions in history. 12/23/2005 01:07:00 AM Volcanic events Dormant volcanoes as potential objects/events. Points even. Santorini eruption "changed the course of history." Possible: Gathering data, potential projects for volcanoes. 12/21/2005 09:05:00 PM 2005-12-21 Reticular / Information Reticular: /"Resembling a net in form; netlike: reticular tissue." /"Cell bodies of the reticular activating system are grouped in the brain stem, just behind the pons and in front of the cerebellum. Their axons reticulate out from there to various parts of the thalamus and cerebral cortex, providing the basis for the area's name. This is an interesting configuration, given that the cerebral cortex is relatively recent with respect to evolution, while the brain stem's design was finalized (or so one would think) long before." /"The reticular activating system is the name given to part of the brain (the Reticular Formation and its connections) believed to be the centre of arousal and motivation in animals (including humans). It is situated at the core of the brain stem between the myelencephalon (medulla) and metencephalon (midbrain). It is involved with the sleep/wake cycle; damage can lead to permanent coma." Information: /"Information is a word which has many different meanings in everyday usage and in specialized contexts, but as a rule, the concept is closely related to others such as data, instruction, knowledge, meaning, communication, representation, and mental stimulus." /".info is a generic top-level domain intended for informative websites, although its use is not restricted. It was a part of ICANN's highly publicized announcement, in late 2000, of a phased release of seven new generic top-level domains (gTLDs)." /"A direct relationship between information and another physical property, entropy, is demonstrated. A consequence is that it is impossible to destroy information without increasing the entropy of a system; in practical terms this often means generating heat." Variations thereof: /Reticular Formation /Reticular Information /In Formation /reticular.info is the center of a networked practice or mode of production 12/21/2005 08:41:00 PM Sentences regarding windows /"What I saw that night was like looking at a hologram or window to another dimension." /"It may be that there exists, in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle and certain other nodal locations of electromagnetic gravitational currents, a door or window to another dimension in time or space through which extra-terrestrial sufficiently sophisticated scientifically can penetrate at will." /"In science fiction, a portal is a window to another dimension." /"Picard and Data arrive, and Manheim tells them he was able to open a window to another dimension, but when he learns how far the effect has spread, he tells them it must be shut down." 12/21/2005 08:38:00 PM Stars Rows of stars fill the emptiness - or, with their mute reiteration, create a nocturnal emptiness of their own. 12/21/2005 08:35:00 PM from Entropy and the New Monuments Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock. 12/21/2005 08:27:00 PM On the use of color A gratuitous use of color can be seen as the creation of a device that can be used to see "through" something. It is a surface of excess. Through excess any possibility of information is diminished and the surface collapses inward. 12/18/2005 08:45:00 PM 2005-12-18 Rocket Tests In the early 1990s, the Deseret Morning News (then named the Deseret News) discovered that in 1965 a nuclear-powered rocket had been tested at the Nevada Test Site. Bolted down, the engine roared for 10 1/2 minutes, "sending skyward a plume of nearly invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust through a superheated uranium fission reactor," wrote Lee Davidson, the paper's Washington Bureau chief. "Three days later, the Atomic Energy Commission found radioactive iodine 131 in town water at Caliente, Nev.," about 90 miles west of Cedar City. An AEC report said the fresh fission products probably came from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China. 12/15/2005 06:06:00 PM 2005-12-15 Novelty Terence McKenna's software plotting the fractals of "novelty" over many thousands of years of earth's history, up to 2012 C.E., at which point novelty will reach the state of infinite fulmination. He defines novelty, of course, as "the density of connectedness" or the "degree of complexity." The I Ching says that Time is a series of identifiable elements in flux. There are 64 of these "elements." He also believes that what we today call the I Ching is but a tiny fragment of a once immense device, now forever lost. 12/15/2005 06:02:00 PM Pattern Recognition The I Ching is based on a set of binary mathematical permutations, which also underlie what I call the "pure" progression of the Mayan number harmonics - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. As it is presented to us, however, the I Ching is actually comprised of the combination of eight symbols (trigrams) of three lines, either broken or unbroken, in all possible combinations with each other. By doubling the trigrams, the permutations yield 64 more complex symbolic possibilities of six lines each (hexagrams). By comparison, the zolk'in is based on permutations of thirteen numbers and twenty symbols or Sacred Signs which yield a possibility of 260 permutations. At minimum, each one of the 260 permutations is a combination of one of thirteen numbers, one of twenty signs, and one of four directional positions. Finally, like the I Ching, the Tzolkin is a system for revealing information relating to a deeper or larger purpose. While the I Ching is precisely synchronized with the genetic code, the Tzolkin is synchronized with the galactic code. As the genetic code governs information concerning the operation of all levels of the life cycle, inclusive of all plant and animal forms, the galactic code governs information affecting the operations of the light cycle. The light cycle defines resonant frequency ranges of radiant energy, inclusive of electricity, heat, light and radio waves that inform the self-generative functions of all phenomena, organic or inorganic. The two codes are obviously interpenetrating and complementary. 12/15/2005 05:59:00 PM The Synergetic Natural Number Continuum The continuum of base ten number is generally looked upon as a progressive and linear series of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Iterations signify the simple addition of the initial unit to each resulting member encountered in the continuing series of elements known as numbes. The digits 1 - 9 are known as integers or numerals. Of course, multiples of 10, 100, 1000, etc. are formed simply by adding zeros. Further analysis discloses that this continuum can be viewed as both progressive and regressive. It is not exclusively linear, but has a cyclic function resulting from the terminal character of the last base digit and the next beginning initiated by zero producing the two-digit range. This doubling of number is for all practical purposes a cyclic function that recycles again and again with each ten-fold group produced. Besides the cyclic and ambidirectional aspects of the number series, there is also a periodic series of reversals that occur in conjunction with the cyclic aspect. 12/15/2005 05:56:00 PM Black Road The Long Count end date on December 21st, 2012 A.D. highlights an astronomical alignment determined by precession. The alignment occurs when the winter solstice sun conjuncts the crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic in Sagittarius. This crossing point is where the "dark rift" in the Milky Way is, which was known to the ancient Maya as xibalba be (the Road to the Underworld) or simply "the Black Road." Linda Schele identifies the nearby crossing point of Milky Way and ecliptic as the Mayan Sacred Tree, and the modern Quiche call that spot "Crossroads." 12/15/2005 05:51:00 PM Null Hypothesis (2) The Maya revered the end-time as a zero point, entered through galactic centre and involving an energy field-effect reversal and rebirth into a new World Age. 12/15/2005 05:50:00 PM Absolute Future In Lorentzian manifolds, the absolute future of an event A is the region containing all the events which can be reached by traveling from A along a future-pointing null curve or timelike curve. Absolute past, the dual concept of absolute future or past-pointing curves. 12/15/2005 05:49:00 PM Alternate Hypothesis The alternate hypothesis, or alternative hypothesis, together with the null hypothesis are the two rival hypothesis whose likelihoods are compared by a statistical hypothesis test. Usually the alternate hypothesis is the possibility that an observed effect is genuine and the null hypothesis is the rival possibility that it has resulted from random chance. 12/15/2005 05:48:00 PM Null Hypothesis In statistics, a null hypothesis says "there is no phenomenon". It is a hypothesis that is presumed true until statistical evidence in the form of a hypothesis test indicates otherwise. For example, if we want to compare the test scores of two random samples of men and women, a null hypothesis would be that the mean score in the male population from which the first sample was drawn was the same as the mean score in the female population from which the second sample was drawn. 12/15/2005 12:41:00 AM Levels of Nothingness The next zone is the dysphotic zone, which extends from about 50 meters, or wherever the euphotic zone ends, to about 1,000 meters. In this zone, there is enough light for organisms to see, but it is too weak for photosynthesis to happen. If we were to venture into the dysphotic zone, we could watch the visible light disappear as we traveled deeper. Once we reached the aphotic zone, there would be no light. This zone extends from about 1,000 meters depth to the ocean bottom. Animals in this zone are rare, but they do exist. Think about the thriving hydrothermal vent communities, which live and prosper without sunlight. 12/15/2005 12:38:00 AM Loss of Color Water particles interact with light by absorbing certain wave lengths (see diagram). First the reds and oranges disappear, later the yellows, greens and purples and last the blue. Loss of the colour red is dramatic and is already noticeable at 50cm! At 5 metres depth some 90% has disappeared. 12/15/2005 12:37:00 AM Surface effects The shape of the water is decisive on how the light passes through it. Coming from an optically less dense medium (air) and entering a denser one (water), the light is partly reflected back while partly entering the water. Depending on the shape of the water, the light forms crinkle patterns or becomes diffused randomly in all directions. The amount of light that is reflected upward depends strongly on the height of the sun (place on Earth, time of day and season) and the condition of the sea. A rough sea absorbs more light whereas a mirror-like sea reflects more. In the tropics, the sun stands straight overhead at mid-day, resulting in little loss. In temperate seas during winter, the light diminishes by as much as 3 f-stops immediately under the surface. As a matter of interest, the reflected light is partly polarised (horizontally) and so is the part that enters the water (vertically). Polarisation is maximal in the early morning and late afternoon when the sun stands low in the sky. The vertically polarised light entering the water makes objects less shiny, more colourful, and can be used creatively, for instance to capture the deep colours of shiny fishes in natural light. 12/05/2005 09:47:00 PM 2005-12-05 Anti-Entropy Reich also designed a "cloudbuster" with which he said he could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. Based on experiments with the orgone accumulator, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature which was responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. During one drought-relief expedition to Arizona, he claimed to have observed UFOs, and speculated that orgone might be used for the propulsion of UFOs. 12/05/2005 07:17:00 PM Instruction 0001 Take spiral galaxy images and rotate circular portions, concentrically, gradually increasing degree magnitude. (Arc-Seconds?) 12/03/2005 02:59:00 PM 2005-12-03 Applied Semantics Strata is a contextual engine 12/03/2005 02:56:00 PM Contextual Color Predecessor Patterns . . . (none) Problem Summary When color is used arbitrarily and gratuitously information is obscured. 12/01/2005 02:23:00 PM 2005-12-01 Crystal Language http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1552451194/ref=pd_bxgy_text_b/104-1136717-7543127?%5Fencoding=UTF8 ‘Crystallography’ means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, ‘lucid writing.’ In the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals – looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, ‘a word is a bit of crystal in formation,’ suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form. 12/01/2005 01:41:00 AM Self-reference and the limits of logic Ancient Greece: Epimenides of Crete: "All Cretans are liars." If he's telling the truth, he must be lying, but if he's lying, then he's telling the truth. 18th century: Barber of Seville: Everyone in town has barber cuts their hair, except those who cut their own hair. Who cuts the hair of the barber? Late 19th century: A. N. Whitehead: set theory will create universal axiomatic foundation for complete and self-consistent mathematics. B. Russell: What about the set of all sets which do not contain themselves?” Early 20th century: Vienna Circle: “Principia Mathematica,” (e.g. Logical Type Theory) to remove self-referential paradox. 1931: Godel’s Theorem: Typographical Number Theory created to show that no system can fully represent mathematics unless it is powerful enough to do self-reference, and no system with full self-reference can escape self-contradictory statements. Therefore, there will always be theorems whose truth or falsehood cannot be ascertained in any powerful system of mathematics. 12/01/2005 12:32:00 AM Alogon Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 10:40:44 -0400 Reply-To: Discussion List on the History of Mathematics , John Conway From: John Conway Subject: Re: alogon Comments: To: Jim Propp In-Reply-To: <199806121355.JAA03863@pfaff.mit.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, Jim Propp wrote: > How is the word "alogon" (used by Proclus to describe irrationals, as I recall) > best translated? "Unutterable", "illogical", "unmeasurable"? > > That is to say, What was the meaning of "logos" in the context of non-Christian > fifth century Greek philosophy/mathematics? I continue: it then seems to have acquired the particular sense of "a collection of words There's a long-standing connection between reason and ratio or proportion, and "analogy" is somewhere around here. "alogon" seems to mean something like "unreasonable", "irrational". JHC ", (Gk "lexis"), as in "Lexicon" (original meaning: phrase-book). Latin "Lex" for law, and so the English words like "legal", come off around here. I might mention also "dialectics". From here we get "writings", passing into "theory" or "study", as in the English "-logy" words. This in turn led to "reasoning", and in particular the English word "logic". 11/23/2005 12:25:00 AM 2005-11-23 Carl Sagan Carl Sagan and The Edge of Forever 11/21/2005 06:31:00 PM 2005-11-21 Geometric truths Geometric truths 10/18/2005 12:21:00 AM 2005-10-18 Part 1: http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=194993&ct=290165 / Part 2: http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=194993&ct=295500 / Part 3: http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=194993&ct=320725 / Part 4: http://www.seti.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=194993&ct=343287 10/03/2005 12:01:00 AM 2005-10-03 Entropy and Points If the universe can be considered to have increasing entropy, then, as Roger Penrose has pointed out, an important role in the disordering process is played by gravity, which causes dispersed matter to accumulate into stars, which collapse eventually into black holes. Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking have shown that black holes have the maximum possible entropy of any object of equal size. This makes them likely end points of all entropy increasing processes. 9/27/2005 02:28:00 PM 2005-09-27 Spaces "The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson 9/09/2005 11:11:00 AM 2005-09-09 Henri Bergson - Homogeneous Time is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness. 9/04/2005 11:34:00 PM 2005-09-04 Sonic Fabric Take an old tape walkman, unscrew the head and remount it on the outside of the plastic housing using silicone. Plug in the headphones, turn the volume all the way up, and press PLAY. Now run the head over the fabric. Works best if you drag it along in the same direction as the tape (as opposed to running it along the warp, which is cotton or polyester). 9/03/2005 07:40:00 PM 2005-09-03 Cymatics In his research with the tonoscope, Jenny noticed that when the vowels of the ancient internal languages of Hebrew and Sanskrit were pronounced, the sand took the shape of the written symbols for these vowels, while our modern languages, on the other hand, did not generate the same result. How is this possible? Did the ancient Hebrews and Indians know this? Is there something to the concept of "sacred language," which both of these are sometimes called? What qualities do these "sacred languages," among which Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese are often numbered, possess? Do they have the power to influence and transform physical reality, to create things through their inherent power, or, to take a concrete example, through the recitation or singing of sacred texts, to heal a person who has gone "out of tune"? 8/24/2005 03:41:00 PM 2005-08-24 Dragons - Monumentality "...while I understand those who call for texture and detail, if only for orientation, quite a bit of my journey has involved uncovering the meaning of distance and scale in these spaces. Even now the I find the ambiguity of scale compelling. All of the complex forms are basically shadows, given volume by a combined of 3D math and stereoptic input. The fog simultaneously hides the extent of the forms while revealing the depth of the shapes." 8/14/2005 04:06:00 PM 2005-08-14 Via London Fieldworks(.com) "Art, science and nature? As categories we seem to know what they mean, but nothing is that resolved when we consider the work of artists who mess with the underside of these categories to the extent that they collapse in a field of their own imagining. Work which functions like a divining rod, never locating the source that which passes through it but seeking it nevertheless." Denise Robinson, foreword to LondonFieldworks Syzgy/Polaria 8/14/2005 03:58:00 PM Music "Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like re were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, falling back, riding in again, and womens's voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices doplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren't drums at all." William Gibson, Virtual Light 8/09/2005 12:35:00 PM 2005-08-09 Knights of the Lambda Calculus: n. A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, the members know who they are.... 8/05/2005 04:36:00 PM 2005-08-05 Substratum http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~pulliam/CFD/Gamma_Prob_LOG/Readme.html Something about the conversation in letter format. 8/02/2005 12:12:00 PM 2005-08-02 Architeuthis (Giant Squid) img http://www.unifr.ch/biol/cours/orgbiol/Architeuthis.jpg Certain keywords: Laboratory, capture, vessels, sustain. Ocean plateau(s) 8/01/2005 12:23:00 PM 2005-08-01 Progenitor star (star that exploded) SN 2005cs belongs to a class of exploding stars called "Type II-plateau." A supernova of this type results from the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star whose light remains at a constant brightness (a "plateau") for a period of time. 7/24/2005 12:00:00 PM 2005-07-24 Vectors Energy has a shape. A given amount of energy traveling in some direction for a certain amount of time is called a "vector". By experimentation it can be demonstrated that the only self-stabilizing combination of vectors is the triangle. So nature is building everything out of triangles. For some thing to be called "matter" it must have an inside and an outside, otherwise it is called "radiation". Anything with an inside and an outside is called a "system". By experimentation it can be demonstrated that the tetrahedron is the minimum shape or structure that energy can take. The minimum "thing" or system in the universe has to be a tetrahedron. Anything less is not a system and does not have the properties of a system. Systems can be made out of triangles. By experimentation it can be demonstrated that only 3 basic systems can be constructed out of equilateral triangles: tetrahedra, octahedra, & icosahedra. Therefore, all of nature must be built up from some combination or multiple of only those three basic systems. Synergetics is the geometry of energy. 7/17/2005 03:32:00 PM 2005-07-17 Double horizon plane; double curvature approach/transcend limit field. 7/10/2005 11:41:00 PM 2005-07-10 IRC Re: Opportunities for a _Visual_ strata system. Many-to-Many. 6/18/2005 12:12:00 AM 2005-06-18 Terraforming Terraforming is a process of planetary engineering, specifically directed at enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth---one that would be fully habitable for human beings. M.J. Fogg, Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, SAE International (1995). 5/17/2005 03:52:00 PM 2005-05-17 On a cinematic time machine The action of the playback propels the viewer backwards and forwards through cinematic time. "The cinematic apparatus" is seen "as an agency to disrupt time." "Time is compressed or stopped inside the movie house, and this in turn provides the viewer with an entropic condition." (Smithson) The action of the viewer moving in between the two screens is what orients them in their specific time as it telescopes inwards into fractions of a second. The viewer is found stuck in a (or series of) present(s). Their sense of temporal position is split as they control the movement of a mirrored image. The condition of a perpetual present is more likely a relentless destruction of a point past it. By bringing the recent past into the context of a mirror, or present, and making it an actuality by giving a viewer agency over the timescale of their image, what is left is the presence of a latent anticipation; anticipation existent but not manifest. The future is never realized because it is a cycle of pasts becoming presents; an inescapable moment stretched out, superimposed onto the next. Time stops in between the screens as soon as you enter them. The structural positioning of the screens and their relational time scales constructs a continuum of time. At the center the viewers movement stops all time and deactivates current experience in favor of possible experience. Moving to another end of the continuum propels them through the sort of anticipatory condition of the moment while the other end essentially catches them. The screens become memory without content because they are nothing but past-ness emerging as present. In a way it gives the illusion of allowing one to construct their own temporal condition while actually removing any one prior. 3/14/2005 12:10:00 AM 2005-03-14 Sourcing Weather Pattern(s) 3/07/2005 10:49:00 PM 2005-03-07 Link PRESENTATION OF THAI CULTURE IN CYBERSPACE: MYTH OR VIRTUAL REALITY The Work of Art in the Age of Quantum Processing Power 3/03/2005 08:18:00 PM 2005-03-03 Amygdala A pair of structures that exist an inch or so in from the forehead. One on the right side and one on the left side. They have impact on mood. (The right one is active when a person is depressed, and the left one is active when a person is cheerful.) Also, they are associated with fear, and the “fight or flight” response. This is possibly instead mapped to the front and backs of both. Associated with religious experience. Elation / Fear 3/02/2005 03:38:00 PM 2005-03-02 Context In the cyberspatial context information is dimmensional. N-dimmensional space to work within. Sculpture in cyberspace is boundless. 3/01/2005 07:14:00 PM 2005-03-01 Enatiamophic Chambers Smithson dissected the illusion of vision in his “Enantiamorphic Chambers.” He stated: “To see ones own sight means visible blindness” Here the “object” became infinite myopia, equidistant dislocation, the manifestation of the division in the eyes.