Bitcoin is so new, it has yet to be fully recognized as a speciation engine. (It could — easily — just be me, but I’m far from convinced that it is yet widely understood what an ‘altcoin’ is, or what this term ultimately means.)
Monthly Archives: May 2015
AO
A tendency to the limit, without limit.
Underlinings (#9)
This needed doing:
[For Baudrillard] Disney, in other words, facilitates ‘hyperreality’ — a semiotic form of cognitive closure — by rendering consumers blind to their blindness. Disney, on the semiotic account, is an ideological neglect machine. Its primary social function is to provide cognitive anaesthesia to the masses, to keep them as docile and distracted as possible. Let’s call this the ‘Disney function,’ or Df. For humanities scholars, as a rule, Df amounts to the production of hyperreality, the politically pernicious conflation of simulation and reality. […] In what follows, I hope to demonstrate what might seem a preposterous figure/field inversion. What I want to argue is that the semiotician has Df all wrong — Disney is actually a far more complicated beast — and that the production of hyperreality, if anything, belongs to his or her own interpretative practice. My claim, in other words, is that the ‘politically pernicious conflation of simulation and reality’ far better describes the social function of semiotics than it does Disney.
(Selected as a taster. Of course, read it all.)
ADDED: Part two.
As a bonus, the latest on Bakker at Dark Ecologies.
Twitter cuts (#3)
How to tell whether you're a writer:
1) Write something.
2) If it took far too long and you now hate yourself, you're a writer.
— Tom Freeman (@SnoozeInBrief) May 26, 2015
Small Books
An appreciation, at Entropy Mag.
East and West
A crash-course in Nisbett at Business Insider:
According to cultural philosophers, Westerners and East Asians have had contrasting views about the concept of truth and how it works for thousands of years — and it shows up in present-day psychology.
It all goes back to the cradles of two civilizations: ancient Greece and ancient China.
It comes down to two different “laws”:
• The Greeks followed the “law of the excluded middle,” which states that if two people are debating, then one of them must be exclusively right and the other exclusively wrong.
• The Chinese followed the “doctrine of mean,” which states that if two people are debating, then they’re probably both partly right and partly wrong — the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
These things have deep roots. …
Poke at the argument just a little, and it goes excitedly recursive.
Language Virus
We might as well be polite to it.
Coming June 2015
(Gnon willing.)
A Poem (#2)
The Main-Sequence of the prime series, in which each number is the index (or ordinate) of the next, proceeds: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 31, 127 …
This numerical sequence is the architectonic principle of Nazareth Modo’s ‘Modular Poetics’. The consummation of the form is found in the Echelon Module, a composition of – exactly – five verses, eleven lines, thirty-one words, and one hundred and twenty-seven letters, containing (as its final part) a module of three verses, five lines, eleven words, and thirty-one letters, containing (as its final part) a module of two verses, three lines, five words, and eleven letters, containing (as its final part) a module of one verse, two lines, three words, and five letters, containing (at the end of its final verse) a module of one line, two words, and three letters.
The first line provides the title.
As an example, here is Modo’s When that which remains, which is thought to be his first achieved instantiation of an Echelon Module (and thus — almost certainly — the first to exist on this earth):
Twitter cuts (#2)
When I was a boy, I told my father that I wanted to be just like him. He tried to dissuade me by making me memorize the Four Laws of Fate.
— UEL ARAMCHEK (@ThePatanoiac) May 15, 2015
Time Spiral Press 