Psybertron Asks

10,000 hunters couldn’t shoot 27 wolves without snow.
(Total population only 220 ?!?! Sounds fragile.)

Another to add to the intriguing list of intellectuals converting to catholicism. Most famous for his much parodied “Trees”, but an interesting if brief life.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

Picked-up on Kilmer because of this quote of the subsequent couplet …

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast

Used as a metaphor for his “peak oil” (pro-nuclear) musings by the whacky Tony Smith – “banned by Arxiv and Cornell” – another who seems to have developed his own contrarian, but complete physics model,

…. one reason being that I refuse to disavow the mystical origins of my intuitions used in constructing the model.

Amongst which he includes a detailed list of “correspondences” between modern physics and work of the Sufi Islam philosopher ibn Arabi, and links to Vedic and Tao Buddhist origins.

And, the reason I looked at that was because Yunus (over at Friends of Wisdom) responded to the latest poem from Alan Rayner …

Imaginative Turn
(c) Alan Rayner 1/1/2010
 
How tiresome it is
This beast that turns in my grave
Shrieking to unearth
Such fearful foreboding
Of what is to come
From what has been done
In the name of the Rose
That holds itself in
Enshrouded by sepals
To keep all its petals
From falling to ground
Out of sight, far from sound
Stalled in the bud
Distilled in the mud
Defended by prickle
Refusing to tickle
But piercing instead
The heart that yearns
To get out of bed
 
How exciting it is
This creature that rises with the sun
Singing its heart out
In radiant flower
Bearing fruit into joys to come
From what has been done
Crying, hip, hip hooray!
In the name of the Rose
That gathers all in
As it dies and grows
Loosing its petals
From the confines of sepals
To spread light in sound
Before turning back inward
Whilst falling to ground
Where others come to bear its energy away
Through death and decay
Into life that unfurls
In the opening
That sustains the possibility
Of flowering afresh
Through darkness in light
Breaking out of bounds
In another day

with his own poem (and the above link). Alan, known for his treeworks (in symbiosis with man & fungi) – here a tree emergent from man’s workings in a forest (Ref BBC Photo Comp).

Alan’s trees always remind me of Peter Gabriel’s lines …

The forest fight for sunlight
Takes root in every tree.

Anyway to close out (branch out from) from this linking cycle,

(1) the banning from Arxiv … the general suppression of anti-establishment theories contrary to received wisdom … put me in mind of Brian Josephson‘s campaign against Arxiv censorship and of course the responses to (say) Lere Shakunle, Rick Ryals or Peter Rowlands alternative physics (plural, one each) …. too easy to be branded

“the village crank hanging out by the public library, who believes he’s found the secret of the universe”

But then again …

The man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds …

 (2) and finally back where we came in – intellectual conversion to catholicism ? A long established theme of mine – the inklings etc – came to mind recently, when yet again (check out the archbishop) I found a theologian talking sense, but being branded too catholic by a fellow Christian. Intriguing. I have pre-ordered Hauerwas memoir on the strength of that.

TED2010 programme includes Jamie Oliver (!) alongside Michael Schermer, Sam Harris, Michael Sandel, Benoit Mandelbrot, James Lovelock, Sheryl Crowe, Kevin Kelly, David Byrne, Dennis Dutton and Bill Gates.

The boy done good.

Another excellent Clive James piece in the BBC Magazine. I keep returning to HAL in 2001 as the archetype and so it seems does Clive.

It’s not as if we haven’t seen the man-machine interface problems long enough to recognize them – Turing’s enigma – but we still idolise “efficiency” over “care”. Spot on Clive.

I’ll add care to trust as the key ingredient of the information age – and yes even the inventor(s) of the semantic web understand that – explicitly (Fig 7). You can’t trust something that doesn’t care. You trust an automated system because of the people that create and support it, but that trust is a very ephemeral quality, easily lost by the slightest exception to the (nevertheless idolised) rules and re-built only by humans, with care.

Automate “customer care” at your peril. Indeed. Automation is simply the the latest idol. When I say latest I don’t mean recent either – back to the Luddites – but the possibility of ever more computerized automation makes our idolatry more psychologically engrained and perilous each human generation. I’m in the business of automation – but it is only a means to an end – to support individual humans – decision support.

Wonderful – Singles and Albums right back to 1950’s. Thanks to Horse over on FaceBook.

I see FaceBook is going the way of GoogleWave – recognizing that each post / thread has a life that is not fixed by membership of any one network. We are networked networks with access & publishing rights changes at each interconnecting node. Wonder what those new controls will look like ? Really must play with Ning and Wave.

Kevin Kelly talking on “The Technium” as he calls it – the “cosmic force” of technology running right through evolution. I probably wouldn’t use his language, but I do agree – the anthropic angle of the self-organizing drive is just that, our perspective, as “the species that domesticated itself” in order to exploit that (otherwise natural) drive. We don’t invent it or control it we manage to ride it as best we can in the best directions we can.

As well as the web becoming literally an organism in every sense of the word, and the real way that both genetic and memetic (human) resources are co-evolving, rather than the latter taking over from the former, I was particularly taken with this “tipping point” kind of conclusion ….

We technophiles are no longer defined by the technologies and gadgets we take up and use (though using is still the key process of developing understanding and of exploiting) …

We are now increasingly defined by the process of which technologies we choose NOT to adopt.

Dead right … inclusion may be as important as selection, but de-selection is still a fundamental part of the evolutionary process.

This must be closely related to my view that good communication is about what not to communicate, in these days of socially connected everything.

Or “Ditchkins” as Eagleton would have them. Came across this (Part 2 of 10) because of the quote about …

“separating the numinous from the supernatural”

… on this Wikipedia page.

I was in fact trying to track down the Greek / Latin split in the etyomology of Numen / Noumena – both clearly about the transdendent, absolute, “divine” nature of things given by their “nodding” acquaintance with god(s), as opposed to empirical phenomena. (This is where we need “PIE” linguists rather than Kant.)

Interesting that “numinous” is seen as a concept worthy of understanding by these four. As noted many times, I am a serious fan of Dennett, have a lot of time for Harris, precious little for Dawkins and a recent admission to having underestimated Hitchens. (Commenting on a review of “God is not Great“. Overall impressions of the four reinforced by just 10 minutes of this conversation.) Looks like Parts 1 to 10 need to be reviewed. The plot thickens and the convergence continues.