Science Literature + Funding Pressure Encourages Divergence

We ask: why is the literature on charge-transfer (CT) mechanisms in organic systems such a shitshow? There are so many different terms for different types of potential mechanisms: tunneling, hopping, but then also superexchange, and resonant tunneling, and multi-step tunneling, coherent hopping, electron delocalization etc etc. Are there likely this many different mechanisms governing the charge transport in organic systems? The answer is definitely not, and a lot of these actually pick out the same fundamental mechanism but just use different terminology because their results were a little different when they ran the experiment.

You have many different groups under pressure from funding sources to publish. This puts a time crunch on things, and you should just get your results out one way or another.

But, you don't want to step on the toes of another published person in the field who might review your manuscript, so you use different terminology. you avoid really pitting your results against their framework, and just use different words, and that wont offend them.

As a result, there isn't a collective effort by the community to converge on a single unified explanation, but rather the opposite force to avoid each other as much as possible to just publish without problems. 

So the answer is: the social organization between researchers, journals, and funding sources.

Short term solution: write a review that goes over all the terms for different CT mechanisms, and what different major groups mean by them. And then you can distinguish (for example) superexchange vs superexchange', where the latter is how the XXX group uses the term which is completely different than the traditional technical meaning.

Long term solution: Rearrange the social dynamic of this deadly triangle. How would you do it?

The Earth's Will to Reproduce

Just quick dump of a thought here, but hopefully will have time to expand.

Q: If the earth is an organism, why hasn't it reproduced?

A: The earth first needs to reproduce by sending its seeds out into space to colonize it. This likely forms the basis of the human fascination with space, remarkable ability of humans to build tech to go into space and explore and proliferate, etc. We are the earth's seeds, and our desires, goals, fascinations, etc all proceed from the earth's will to reproduce.

The Correlation Between Philosophy and Politics

Part 1
One of Heideggers ideas is this idea of the Gay man. Where like the truly free man has recognized his condition and that he will never be fulfilled in this higher sense, and this gives him a radical freedom and unshakeable joy
Now, what the gay man does need not change, but it’s how he does it
He no longer expects a permanent fulfillment from his projects, he just does them for the sake of doing them
Now, it’s important to note here that the gay man does not drop his projects, because if he did it would be like admitting that he expected meaning out of them and got disappointed
He simply “sticks to things without getting stuck to them”
So I was thinking about how heidegger uses the specific term “projects” here
Camus has an almost identical formulation
Where he’s like should I kill myself or drink a cup of coffee
Aka once you confront the absurd, the futility of the world doesn’t actually direct you to kill yourself, it’s just one option among many
And in fact using that as an excuse to kill yourself would NOT indicate a confrontation w the absurd, since it implies that you were “disappointed” by the futility and therefore assign value to it
It’s the same point, but much more coldly and rawly stated, and he doesn’t use the term “projects”
It’s almost like Heideggers is more obviously a state brainwashing tactic
Where the goal is to convince disillusioned youths to not drop their projects but still gave value to their depression
But still give*
And you can make an argument that Sartre and Camus were doing this for the left, and H was doing it for the right
And on top of that, Sartre and Camus had complementary shortcomings
Camus was a poet of life who wished he had more pull w the academic community
Sartre had the whole community at his feet but always lamented not being able to use words with the right type of sincerity and passion (poetry)
Heidegger had both in one package, an analytically sound but still poetic-passionate view of man
I wonder if you can correlate this philosophical victory to the rise of the fascist right at that time...
Both of them were using existentialism to appeal to depressed youth, just for different sides.

I wonder if this is happening now with the victory of Sloterdijk…
That’s the first major point.


Part 2
The second part of this meditation: its interesting when you connect this to our other discussions on sort of, the role of certain philosophical concepts and propagation of them in grooming fascist tendencies to take over.
Wherein, we frame it as, certain types of thought, having to do with void, failure of liberalism, return to the tribe/myth, secrets of the unconscious, self-reliance, etc tend to fuel of rise of fascism in the country they are propagated
But in the existentialism case, the same concepts were being used to fuel both sides of the political spectrum!
So maybe this DOES imply a non-correlation between Phil concepts and their political consequences
It’s just how they’re marketed and who they’re marketed to that makes the difference

Part 3
Now, on first glance, you might think that this sort of allows us to hate on Heidegger for being a Nazi without burying his ideas; he just marketed great ideas for a bad cause (let's say intentionally or unintentionally for now, thats a different discussion). 

BUT, then you can argue "okay, doesn't that imply that heidegger's ideas, in his formulation, are still marketed towards bad things, and therefore his writings, as written, are bad?"
Which leads to the question: How do we distinguish his concepts from his framing of them?
Ironic, because this struggle between the framing of beings and the Being of them is an issue he really worked through.

It also leads to the question "can one just preach philosophy in a vacuum?"
is it always inherently directed at a political audience, with its own ideology, even if the author doesn't intend it?
Is philosophy a scalar or a vector?

If this leads you to think "well, the author has his intentions, but after he writes it, the book becomes its own new thing since hermeneutics and transcendent idealism etc etc." then I challenge you yet another time: this would imply that camus or sartres formulation of existentialism, having similar concepts to Being and Time but marketed to the more inclusive Left, is the "good" version of the text. But then, why is Being and Time the preferred version that's still used as the canon, by a mile? Clearly its content goes above and beyond its marketed political effect... and a second challenge on that, wouldn't this be like saying that the Bible was a better version of reality than Epicurious' much more accurate account of reality at the time, because the Bible placated the masses and led to less violence, aka had better political consequences?

Cultural Critique of "Dissect" Music Podcast

Here is Dissect's mission statement:

https://dissectpodcast.com/about/

In a world creating and accessing more content than ever before, we’ve quickly become a scrolling culture, hurriedly swiping through this infinite swath of content that seems to replenish without end.
Dissect was created to counter this cultural shift.
Dissect picks one album per season and analyzes one song per episode measure by measure, word by word.

It's a noble endeavor, and Pimp a Butterfly is an excellent album to start with! But in a general sense, here is my critique:

It's funny how connoisseur culture favors this kind of stuff. i might be critical here: their message is to reverse the scroll-through culture that our hyperconsumerism has led to, but their remedy (feeding you the exhaustive list of facts about the song in order to truly capture it) suffers from an arguably similar cultural sickness. In the end we don't put on the headphones and close our eyes through an album anymore, we either scroll through feeds or reductively dissect the facts about a song in order to conquer it (see: success of rapgenius). Let's be cautious in how we frame our solution.

That being said, I'm definitely going to play the shit out of this because I'm a complete product of connoisseur culture. 

The Reversed Role of Modern Working Art: Pulling Us Out of the Void

pre WW2, the goal of working art was to unconceal the earth from underneath us, and present it as such

for example painting obscene pictures of naked old people, because no one likes thinking about that, its hidden from our daily life, we push it away

its a concealed earth that we walk on and are oblivious too and rely on its concealment in order to maintain comfort

and this is heideggers definition of working art, and it makes sense

and i think in his era, the important thing to do (a la deconstruction) was pull people out of the romantic and into the void that they were repressing

romantic/classical, depending on whether you were religious or technical etc

but in any case the "earth" in this case was the uncomfortable void that everyone was ignoring

and people more or less do the same thing today, but what if its the opposite?

we've confronted the absurd formally ever since camus/sartre, and have been DEFAULT in the void

so working art is now about pulling us out of the absurd and back into the romantic

reminding us that feelings are still real, and things DO matter, even though we dont want to admit it

this meditation was inspired by this track:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Eqm7hD828cATBLUx2fJox?si=fbFjH0ggQ-mm0tgPyaRKew

Opioid Epidemic Cultural Breakdown

i just read such a beautiful interview on NPR about opioids

the guy FUCKING laid it out

in an era where machines are threatening the dignity of the "working man"

he loses an aspect of meaning, but also religion is gone now too, so he can't fill the void with that either

oxycontin actually serves as an instant replacement for oxytocin, which is the neurotrans. released when you get social acknowledgement like sex, being rewarded for work, or partaking in communal spirituality

furthermore, technological age of screens encourages us to get "lost in our own worlds" at the screen rather than going out and interacting

so staying home in ur own world using oxycontin is a natural consequence of undignified labor + expired religions + screens

a couple of other things, 1. you can trace this correlation starting from the AIDS movement where patient autonomy was encouraged, aka fight for your treatment as a patient regardless of what doctor says, to now. This patient autonomy is part of why patients are so adamantly demanding these drugs.

2. this is hitting men much harder than women. part of this is because men have been traditionally getting their prestige and meaning from manual work, which is now gone, and also that being a man is sort of irrelevant in this social progressive period where the woman is being redefined in a fruitful way.

so all of this together just leads to people demanding drugs to ease pain, but then sinking into this world of meaninglessness and loneliness that can only be nurtured by oxycontin.

tldr: opoid epidemic is less of a physical/economic issue and much more of a spiritual, psychological, and existential issue.

you can also see this in the surge in weed and meditation in culture

people are desperately trying to fill this void

you can't just view humans as economic agents, they will lose meaning and destroy themselves

you need a system which views them as complex, psychological, emotional etc beings

we need a new religion etc

it was such a good interview, best one ive heard in a while, here is the original article:

https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/the-poison-we-pick-261d062e6938

7 mins

Sartrean Solution to Consumerism: Consume Nothingness

General Summary: We can’t help but have an impulse to consume in our modern society, so the solution is not to avoid consuming, but to consume nothingness (i.e. your relaxing breath). this parallels sartre who sort of said, we can’t help but asking “what is consciousness” in our ego-based society, so the solution is not to avoid talking about it, but to just call it “a pool of nothingness in the brain” that sucks everything in.
--------------------------------------------------

We are trapped in layers of consumerism. In one sense, we can resist temptations--eating, smoking, masturbation, etc to rebel against consumerism. But we still lose here, as the entire Western society we are situated in is framed in terms of consumerism, so you will constantly find yourself in jail. Every directive and norm is telling you to consume, and you have to pass constantly. This is not solving the problem, but rather imprisoning yourself to it.

Sartre found himself in the same situation in the 20th century--we were still trapped in Descarte's formulation of the cogito--unable to formulate our relationship to the world without conceiving of our "selves," our discrete "consciousness," which necessarily separates us from the world. Even if you say things like "my consciousness is connected deeply with the world" or "we are all one!" you still lose in the same way as consumerism above, because the cogito, whether formulated as "consciousness," heideggarian dasein, kantian transcendental subject, etc, is still the individualist separatist framework within which you are operating.

So Sartre devised an ingenious solution--let us not rebel against the framework we irresistably operate in, but rather invert it with nothingess. He defined consciousness as "a pool of nothingness in the brain," a sort of vacuum that is always sucking in everything. In this formulation, you submit to the cogito, but also transcend it, as now consciousness is always OF something, and if it is not filling itself with SOMETHING in the world, then it is--literally--nothing.

I stumbled upon a solution to consumerism that I found strikingly similar to this. If I meditate immediately for 10 minutes upon waking up in the morning, focusing on my breath and watching the dreams go around in my surface-dreaming mind, without falling asleep, my breath becomes an exceptionally calming force throughout the rest of the day, almost like a drug. It is as if doing breathing exercises in the morning while my brain is still on drugs forges a connection between breathing and hallucinating that MILDLY maintains itself throughout the rest of the day. Here, any time I felt a consumptive impulse, I would simply breath, and it would have this neurally calming effect, similar to that of a drug. And in this case, I could consume, consume, consume all I wanted, eating nothingness all day, but oddly escaping the paradigm of consumerism from within it.

Do not rebel against your framework--invert it with nothingness.

"Man would rather consume nothingness than not consume at all"

Analysis of Scorsese Movie Silence

Silence is a powerful 2017 film by Martin Scorcese, that pierces deeply into some interesting theological questions. Below is a discussion analyzing some of these points, between a friend and me.




Friend:

Finished it


Wow


Me:

He kept the cross.



Friend:
Yeah


Did his wife.slide it into his hand?


It was such a good movie


Its like Padres came to Japan to "save" the Japanese but the only way to save them was to give up their ego, which is the route to Buddhist salvation


And all the inherent conceptual conflicts between Christianity and Buddhism


Damn



Me:
Yes, but also more importantly than their ego, their spirit, their entire world view


It’s asking much more than taking your life, in a sense



Friend:

Yeah


True




Me:
Because they wanted to die for their beliefs, they did NOT want to live to see their beliefs die




Friend:
Such a beautiful film


Wow


Well put




Me:
But you realize at the end that he did the ultimate sacrifice


He gave up all external signs of his belief, stepped on jesus, to forever go down in history as a heretic. But he kept the cross. He kept his belief in the end


He was the first Protestant, in a sense




Friend:
Ah that's a good point




Me:
External rituals are irrelevant, as long as you stay true to your personal relationship with god


That’s why he heard jesus’ voice at that crucial moment, saying step on me, it’s okay




Friend:
Yeah! And in the end, when Jesus said I was suffering beside you in the silence




Me:
Ugh yes, fuckkkkk


In a sense he did the hardest thing


He could have disbanded his beliefs like Ferreira, or died for his beliefs


But he decided to externally disband them while internally holding on


The ultimate enslavement 2017


I’ll have to hand 2017 over to him tbh


He won that shit




Friend:
Yeah seriously

And yeah I’m assuming he had his wife give it to him

How was that movie not way more popular



Me:
Probably too deep for most


Same with birdman




Friend:
Oh hold up


What if he didn't




Me:
They both had that layered quality, like 6 different layers


Of meaning




Friend:
What if she just gave that to him


Which maybe makes it more beautiful


Like he would never jeopardize her in any way


And he never outwardly showed his faith


But she saw it in him still



Me:

Yeah, good point. They leave it up to the viewer, to add more layers of meaning


Same with birdman. Remember the ending?


There were like 4 ways you could interpret it, and each made it a completely different movie




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
I was always curious whether he kept “silently” blessing kijichiros confessions, even after


Cuz they showed one instance of him doing it silently




Friend:
I think he did




Me:
But at the same time they said the one emperor dude was watching him super closely to the end of his life and saw now Christianity


No*


And he kind of used Japan’s metaphysics against them, the same way they did against him


They were so preoccupied with external signs, so he gave that to him


But he still kind of won, while letting hem win too




Friend:
Yeah!!! You're right!!




Me:
Cuz all they wanted was to write down in history that he showed no external signs and therefore was not Christian


But he totally challenged that


Ahhhhh so many layers!!!




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
The brilliance was, when I first saw it I was like man they broke him, Japanese ego death wins,


But when they show the cross at the very end


It just totally fucks WVERYTHING up


And starts adding all the layers




Friend:
Yeah and I think he thought he wasn't a Christian anymore too



Me:
Still maintaining the top layer, but adding so many more



Friend:
Bc he denounced




Me:
Also cool symbolism: if you watch closely, kijihiro and the other Japanese Christians only partially step on jesus’ face toward the end


Because they are still preoccupied with the externality




Friend:
But him dying with the cross hidden in his hand really showed that he still was, even if he didn't think he was bc of how he externally lived




Me:
But our boy puts his WHOLE foot on there, he don’t give a shit!!!




Friend:
True!




Me:
And that line at the end too: he failed in the eyes of god, or I guess, that’s between him and god.....


Then it shows the cross


AHHHHHHHH. The best.





Friend:
it's such the best one




Me:
Silence moonlight and birdman


Top 3 easily




Friend:
Yeah!


Without a doubt


Man


That was such a powerful movie


Even how is was shot


Most of the movie is silence or the sounds of nature


But when it's not silent, you almost don't want it to be


Bc the dialogue uncovers or fortells pain


And if it's not dialogue, the silence is broken by suffering


The pit or the cross on the shoreline are the worst ways to die I think


Japanese are fucked up




Me:
Yes!


The surface layer is that the Christians are doing it for their glory, the price is the suffering of others


Which is true


But a lot of the other layers Kind of subvert the Japanese

Climate Change Skepticism as an Opportunity for Cultural Shift

had a meditation this morning

was thinking, climate change skepticism is actually a really good opportunity for science, and global culture at large, to make a marked distinction between the truth and technical-sounding jargon

right now they are viewed as one in the same by most laypeople

thats why an argument for global warming and an argument for why the earth is flat are equally compelling to laypeople

its just a bunch of exclusive technical jargon, and that is one of the issues in truth-revealing practices such as science...it is one of the most rigorous and reliable, yet also one of the most exclusive...accessibility was never a focus, and that's led to a national crisis

one solution is education, yeah

but i wonder if there is something else, where we can finally change the language to not be as exclusive and make truths more self-evident

perhaps blockchain?

Some Scattered Thoughts on Season 2 Episode 4 of Black Mirror

I would write this into a cohesive post but am in a bit of a crunch, so hopefully these can serve as helpful notes for someone who would like to write a thoughtpiece on this. Feel free to take, just happy to get these ideas out. I bolded the parts in particular that I thought could be nice aphorisms from the episode:



I saw ep 4 of black mirror, a truly beautiful revealing of the importance of death in the human story. with a presentist mode of existence, and the important characteristic ability that we have to "forget" (a la Nietzsche), would we really want to keep going, if we had the chance? easy to say yes now, hard to know what you'd say then.
this was the first good episode this season for me,
the importance of life's ephemeral glow.
her decision to stay with the girl into eternity was so much more heartbreaking than the option to die and preserve the meaning she lived
cheating death does not evade nothingness, if anything, it emphasizes it
sartre would have loved that episode
we live with this paradoxical yearning to both escape death and experience a type of meaning that transcends life. this episode sort of demonstrates that we can't have both, in a really beautiful way.
singularity is bullshit, technology can't "solve" existentialism.

Conversation with a friend:
i had to like, think for a while just to reconcile the emotional disturbance it left me with
thats a sign of a good ep

yeah
It's so creative, even as a premise, then to build that world, build the characters so that we care about them, and then introduce a conflict and meaningful resolution
All in 90 mins

Yes! How could they do so much in so little time!
High maintenance also is good at this in its own way
Like you know so much about everyone so quickly, from so little

Character driven plot development

But this black mirror had this kubrick-esque quality
Where even at the end, during the supposedly happy ending, you can't help but feel there is something deeply disturbing about all this when you're looking at those circulating lights at the very end
Similar type of discomfort u get during the outro to 2001 odyssey

Just like, not readily explainable, but you know there's something

This is what Heidegger called "working art"

African Americans and Vegans

New interesting facts:

1. Black Americans are called African Americans, Black Canadians are called Black Canadians.

2. There was a temporary vegan collective in Iran, one of the few vegan groups in history which did not suffer from B12 deficiency.  The speculation is that there was a lot of animal feces everywhere which contaminated their food, and that they grew some veggies out of human feces, and ate the roots, which had trace B12 content.  This has inspired me to make the following graph:

Notice how a severe b12 deficiency hits when you first turn vegan, but if you continue to love animals to the point that you bask in their shit you actually escape the trend.  With enough Love anything is truly possible.

Hermit

Changed my life.
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-true-hermit?src=longreads&printable=true

Future Science

Automated Professors
http://narrativescience.com/artificial-intelligence-platform/

Open-Source Science
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632760
http://www.openscienceframework.org/

Automated/Centralized Experimental Infrastructure
https://www.transcriptic.com/

http://www.synthego.com/

Synchronicity

Some wiki excerpts on this beautiful concept.  Following the excerpts, I will use this post as a place to collect all examples of synchronicity that happen to me:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningfulmanner. 

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.^[8]

 Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.^[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.

Example:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.^[15]

(9:16:16 PM) Amro Maz: this one time

(9:16:19 PM) Amro Maz: i was at the airport

(9:16:23 PM) Amro Maz: and my mom was late to pick me up

(9:16:36 PM) matteoplix: uh oh

(9:16:38 PM) Amro Maz: so when i arrived, i went and hid behind a column

(9:16:40 PM) matteoplix: amir is FLIPPING OUT

(9:16:54 PM) Amro Maz: and every like 5 minutes i peeped out

(9:17:05 PM) Amro Maz: this one time, after one of the peeps

(9:17:12 PM) Amro Maz: RIGHT when i saw the back of her head

(9:17:20 PM) Amro Maz: she SUDDENLY turned around and looked directly at me

(9:17:37 PM) Amro Maz: later when i discussed this with her she said she "felt" me staring at her

(9:17:49 PM) Amro Maz: this i believe was an example of synchronicity
-------------------------------------

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) man

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) that must have been hard to watch

Amir:

what

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) my descent into madness

(matteoplix) wtf

(matteoplix) dude fucking stop

(matteoplix) with the sn=yncrhon

(matteoplix) holy FUCK

Amir:

me?  i never noticed such a thing

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) ok guys get this

Amir:

sep

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) im re listening to the fly lo

(matteoplix) and as kofi typed

(matteoplix) descent into madness

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) hahahaha

(matteoplix) i heard “descent into madness”

Amir:

NO

A very cheeky symbiosis.

(2:35:30 PM) matteoplix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
(2:35:31 PM) matteoplix: BOOM
(2:44:34 PM) bboyamir: SICK
(2:45:22 PM) matteoplix: i went in one
(2:45:24 PM) matteoplix: soooo cool
(2:45:30 PM) bboyamir: OH really!
(2:45:38 PM) bboyamir: in mexico?
(2:45:39 PM) matteoplix: yup in new mexico
(2:45:41 PM) bboyamir: new
(2:45:45 PM) bboyamir: damn thats tight
(2:45:50 PM) matteoplix: was sick nasty
(2:45:58 PM) matteoplix: it was so cool inside despite the temperatures
(2:46:01 PM) matteoplix: no ac
(2:46:42 PM) bboyamir: see like
(2:46:45 PM) bboyamir: technology and nuclear energy
(2:46:49 PM) bboyamir: thats us DOMINATING nature
(2:46:55 PM) bboyamir: but these earthships
(2:47:00 PM) bboyamir: thats us like smirking at nature
(2:47:05 PM) bboyamir: and i kind of like that attitude more
(2:47:09 PM) matteoplix: yeah
(2:47:09 PM) bboyamir: windmills too
(2:47:12 PM) matteoplix: like hey , i see u
(2:47:15 PM) matteoplix: nature
(2:47:22 PM) matteoplix: very cheeky symbiosis
(2:47:25 PM) bboyamir: hahahah
(2:47:34 PM) matteoplix: thats the way it needs to be
(2:47:39 PM) matteoplix: no more raping

What should be our approach to renewable technology? Shall we only focus on the utilitarian end goal, the destination, securing pure energy in the most efficient manner possible, or is the method, the journey, the approach, equally important? Is the world our gas station or our friend?

For more see: Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"

Here is a supplement:

When Heidegger investigates 'the question concerning technology' he is interested in the essence of modern technology, not just any technology; for it is modern technology that poses the problem. Heidegger presents as an example of traditional technology peasant farming. The relationship of the peasants to the land is one of respect: they tend the land, are stewards of the land, cultivating it, synchronized with its patterns, to let the crop develop out of it. Modern technology, however, exploits the land as pure resource, trying to gain the 'maximum yield at minimal expense'. Modern technology challenges the land, or whatever it happens to be exploiting, to yield more. Objects are thus revealed as pure resource. Objects are exploited for all the energy or use they can yield and are left to stand there until they are to be challenged for more use again. For instance, the dam on the Rhine reveals the Rhine as merely a resource for hydroelectric power. Even viewing the Rhine for its beauty has been made into a tourist industry, again exploiting the Rhine as a resource for tourist gratification and photos.

the digital medium, the next facebook, broomsticks, neo-heidegger

Alright first,

The Digital Medium

• Three Principles

pretty cool blog, but more cool is its 'three principles'

http://inventingthemedium.wordpress.com/three-principles/

Inventing the Medium is based on three foundational principles:

All things made with electronic bits and computer code belong to a single new medium, the digital medium, with its own unique affordances.

Designing any single artifact within this new medium is part of the broader collective effort of making meaning through the invention and refinement of digital media conventions.

When we expand the meaning-making conventions that make up human culture, we expand our ability to understand the world and to connect with one another.

• The Next Facebook/Google+

Given this digital medium, we can ask two questions

(1) what makes an internet medium popular?

(2) what makes an internet medium cool?

Clearly facebook encapsulates the answer to 1). But we can note some severe shortcomings to facebook, and why it's not 2) yet:

exhibit a) the social graph

"The funny thing is, no one's really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what's basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online."

exhibit b) m00t on facebook and identity constraint

http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/?utm_campaign=Feed:%20Mashable%20(Mashable)&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&WT.mc_id=obinsite00000

google+ came out and it was basically the same as facebook in terms of identity and most of us were unimpressed. that's why everyone's still waiting. the new facebook will have to change not just the way we share content (re: google+'s circles), but "who we share it as."

• Future of Interactive Design

In addition to the new popular digital medium, what does the future of the electronic medium--those devices that access the digital medium--have in store for us?

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

It better NOT be the ipad.

Next up,

Broomsticks revealed

Just that way of framing the practice: rather than aesthetics, they focused on potent plants that had powers, functional plants, plants that cast spells. that's such a cool way of viewing it. just a different mindset back then. i'm not even going to say the difference back then was a lack of knowledge. just a different mindset.

Neo-Heidegger focused on space

"The book ends, symmetrically, with a meditation on Mary's giving birth to Christ, as an image of the mother-child dyad that brings the reader up to the edge of the Renaissance, when the major spheric disintegration took place once Copernicus et. al. started to question the notion of being encased inside whirling cosmic macrospheres. When those spheres were shattered, all hell, did indeed, break loose, and humanity was set on the path toward Nietzsche's annunciation of the death of God as a disguised cry that the human being now, for the first time ever, faced a gigantic cosmos alone and unprotected by any metaphysical immune system. Hence, the anxieties of the 20th century, its chaos of wars and its profusion of sages, each of whom desperately attempts to offer a pharmaceutical balm to soothe the anxiety of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger put it.

Sloterdijk, indeed, picks up from where Heidegger left off, for it was Heidegger's primary task to situate the lonely philosophical Ego into a specific and very concrete world, where he is always already engaged in doing something, thus putting an end to the subject-object dichotomy that had haunted philosophy since Descartes. Sloterdijk picks up the tradition of embedding the individual in a context by saying that not only is the human already in the world doing something, but he is specifically inside a container of some sort that functions as an extension of the mother womb. He or she is always involved with someone -- even when no one appears to be present -- inside an invisible environment of one ontological sort or another. Ontology, then, is applied immunology."

http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiotext-Foreign/dp/1584351047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320753177&sr=8-1

Internet progress

moot on preserving the freedom in individual identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e3Zs74IH0mc

also, an awesome letter written in 1992 about the onset of the 'cyberpunk'

http://cyber.eserver.org/cyberpnk.txt

Charlie Chaplin speaks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo&feature=related

This time is approaching...one can feel it.

Minimalist Portraits of Cultural Icons

so sick

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/07/28/noma-bar-guess-who/

Noma bar is awesome:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/03/29/noma-bar-negative-space/

(thanks brainpickings)

True authenticity

After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him to be "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era's most perfect man." Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that "he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."

I would like to introduce Sartre to this guy.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jxxay/who_is_that_guy_or_that_girl_from_your_office_and/c2g0vgv