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/

Generalization by Familiarity

This is something we all do.

Source: I'm planning out a task (taking fully dissolved nmrs of several reaction crudes) into a series of microtasks (weigh out solids into a bunch of vials, screen solvents, dissolve crudes in those solvents, nmr them all together) out loud to my undergrad and suddenly I got a feeling of familiarity which led to me following with "This is a big part of being a chemist: taking a daunting level of work and reducing it to a few, simple, highly parallelized tasks that wont take very long at all."

And I thought, wait, that generalization I made is insanely specific to this situation, why am I saying this is what all chemists do?  The feeling of familiarity could have just been at planning itself, not the specific method of planning.  It could have been from just parallelization itself in the abstract, why did I have to say link it explicitly to chemistry?  We often get a feeling of familiarity after doing something, and tend to generalize this vague familiarity based on whats going on at the time, but can very easily pick out the wrong features to generalize since the feeling itself is vague, its the articulation which follows that we choose and specify.

Transformation

matteoplix:

sepheps

Amir Mazaheripour:

were too caught up in transformations

matteoplix:

kk

sounds fun tho

Amir Mazaheripour:

of course it does, its what we all do every day

matteoplix:

:D / :(

Amir Mazaheripour:

whether its eating a snack, fixing a leak, knitting a sweater, we feel the need to transform the matter around us in order to feel “occupied”

and it seems like things are changing

but just like brostep

its more like a wild, desperate disruption, a forced superficial change in the short term, just to see something different

but in the long term, matter is indifferent to how much you manipulate it

it will still always be there

as matter

staring at you

unsolved

apathetic

transformations are just a game, an act we put on to convince ourselves

a fleeting flagellation 

matteoplix:

yes

wow

matteoplix:

transformation is essential to it all

Amir Mazaheripour:

i basically had this image of like a man with a bunch of “stuff” around him (visualize it as homogenous clay), and like panicking and shuffling it all around, but it doesn’t care, its still clay

matteoplix:

science

AND art

Amir Mazaheripour:

and then i thought “thats the story of every man”

yes

^^

Amir Mazaheripour:

its just an interesting concept

transformation

Amir Mazaheripour:

it seems like one of the few human cultures that hasn’t fallen into it is a certain eastern zen/buddhism/hinduism bent, where you cease external transformation and see the unified world through the self

but thats how powerful it is

almost all other cultures get caught up in external transformation

and while zen/buddhism is the leader, they still are not excused

they burn incense, they need to see certain things transform too

we’re all culprits

transformation is time

without time we all stop.

LSD

Italian Stallion's Answer:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090125204016AAN5VH9

Bodily Rearrangement (Burps):
". I personally tend to get a lot of burping when on the rise of my trips. "

Occasionally people will experience so-called Acid Indigestion on LSD, which usually manifests as minor burping without any real nausea or desire to vomit. This is often easily alleviated by loosening tight clothing and by performing relaxation exercises.

but i would just burp and it would feel awesome

but also like

fundamental

the burps were part of a material rearrangement going on in my body

mainly torso

Spilt Letters
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/10033491

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Upon closer inspection the whole sea was filled with letters! Everywhere I saw letters of the alphabet in random patterns and combinations and spiraling in and out up and down flowing like water. I got closer and closer to the 'water' and I saw more and more letters. They got thicker and thicker. It was like those fractal things they use in math. Never ending. It felt amazing just drifting there. 
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=32307

Taipei book review

Nice excerpt from a book review on Tao Lin's Taipei

Paul’s mother thinks that experience outside of the Internet makes a person more interesting, she believes that a mind on drugs is a compromised mind, and she thinks of relationships as two people in love who are nice to each other. Paul, in contrast, lives according to the maximum possibilities of the present: he makes little distinction between the parts of his life that are mediated through his computer and the parts he experiences physically. He also does not distinguish between a physical state of sobriety and one on drugs. His relationships are fragile, tenuous things where petty irritations and insecurities will, with time, always overwhelm the desire to love and be loved.

Conversation with Monk

Context: I work at a radiostation at our university and we have monthly staff community hours we are required to fulfill.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN MONK AND ME

A: Oh, i almost forgot (opens laptop)

M: Why do you feel the need to type that out right now?

A: Because i transcribe my staff hours to a google doc, to keep track of them.

M: but there are so many other important things today that you forgot/chose not to keep track of originally. what is so different about this? 

A: they're my staff hours; i have monthly requirements to meet

M: this month, yes, but then they will just Vanish into the past like everything else.

A: yeah but not immediately.  they might cause a fuss at the station and it would bite my ass for like a little bit before vanishing.  i'm doing this to avoid that potential ass-biting, in case I forget about these hours; listen, it's purely a practical issue

M: what do you do in a given day that isn't "purely a practical issue?"

Practicality is assumed.

We live in an era of dreamers trapped in a duty, a perceived obligation to be practical, functional, tangible (and therefore "real"--the ultimate religious copout, a claiming to the "real").  everything should have a tangible result/object.  no one treats life as an absurdist canvas, an art portrait to create a story with anymore; we are shrewdly ends-oriented.  we are increasingly mechanical.   And I call us dreamers because I do see and feel the yearning in us for something more, something different.  We are just so entrenched in the modern belief in practicality;  i mean it's practically self-evident that we need to do practical things which have real functionality, self-evident tasks which must obviously be done (it's just the most practical and useful thing to do...see the dogmatism here?).  we dont question it, we laugh at those who do (laughing at something with great confidence and certainty is always a sign to be worried about, a sign of ideology).  i go from my job which makes money to my house which provides shelter where I watch TV to entertain myself before eating to nourish my body and falling asleep to regenerate my cells. i have sex with my wife to maintain our physical relationship and satisfy my libido.  i smoke weed to get high and forget about shit.  i only think of things to do, things which have an end.  what isn't a purely practical issue these days?  i think this is an important question to ask.   artists need to hone efforts on politics to maintain any relevance (it's the cool thing now to take art out of abstract realms and hone it in on brute, obnoxious practicality).  poetic terrorism--trapping the absurd in the relevant, the tangible.  Ironically I think this ultimately stifles the creativity we need to achieve a truly paradigmatic, "tangible" change in our current "tangible-change" oriented society.

The question also may be, why did I decide to pause and write this instead of scramble to write hours down right now like I normally would have?

perhaps that's where "I" step in,

away from the humming machine of the masses.

Understanding vs Metaphor: Science Deconstruction

A reflection during organic mechanisms lecture:

Language is evidence that we do most of our understanding through metaphors

We keep talking about how an atom is "attached" to the neighboring carbon.  But "attaching" is a contextually macroscopic concept.  We attach pieces of cloth to each other, we attach vehicles to tow trucks.  We use this term metaphorically to understand molecular phenomena.  The same goes for all of science*, and all human understanding.  Metaphors.

*Science hinges on these metaphors for explanatory understanding, but is very subtle about it.  It claims to be in the business of discovering robust mathematical laws that describe nature, and the explanatory understanding is peripheral.  But if this is true, science should not claim to understand nature, as it does so purely through metaphors.