Vistas of reality

The galaxy I Zwicky 18, originally thought to be a young galaxy, actually seems to have formed around the same time as most other galaxies. The bluish-white knots in the heart of the galaxy are two major star-forming regions.

Nasa / Hubble - image here, more here

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu [full text]

Casey's Island

Strong Coloring Sample by Claudio Rocchini

The goal of Island2012.com is to get people to pay to join a community and advertise on that community under the promise of being allowed to live on an island that Serin intends to purchase with proceeds from advertising. [Wikipedia]

It can't last, but Casey Serin resurfaced about a month ago with a plan to buy an island, and the last few days he's been doing podcasts / call-ins. The archive of the shows [three so far] can be found here, until he breaks down and tries to erase everything again. Streaming video here. The new blog, which is nothing much to look at yet, is here.

Steve Serin, Casey's brother, has his own blog on the saga.

Another law of nature

Poincare Halfplane by Claudio Rocchini

Rudy Rucker has a post on finishing his memoir.

...thanks to the chapter I wrote about society as a kind of computation in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I’ve finally came to accept that writers’ sales obey a scaling law that’s technically known as an inverse power law distribution. You’re not getting lackluster book advances because someone is actively screwing you. It’s the scaling law.

The scaling law applies across the board—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. There’s no getting around it. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. That’s how nature is. It’s not anyone’s fault. [more]

About the same time I read that I saw John Gray's review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton [which I haven't read], and this passage jumped out:

One episode covers the time the author spent with a career counsellor, “a professional dedicated to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment”. Describing a session with Carol, a private client, “37 years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of 45 in an office near the Bank of England”, de Botton recounts how Carol suddenly stared to sob as the counsellor “watched her with his kindly eyes, and outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll round the carp pond”. The counsellor has dedicated his life to the belief that work is a quest for self-enactment, a way of becoming who we really are. The trouble is that, like many of his clients, Carol seems perplexingly diffuse in her interests, and it is not clear whether there is a self concealed somewhere within her that is waiting to be enacted. Worse, it is unclear whether, if such a self does emerge, anyone will have any interest in it. These uncertainties extend to the counsellor himself who, in return for allowing de Botton to sit in on the sessions, asks to be referred to a literary agent who could promote a book on which he has been working. Twelve agents are contacted, and each replies with polite enthusiasm. The book remains unpublished.

Commenting on this episode, de Botton writes: “For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary projects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood.” [more]

I don't have these anxieties anymore, but that might be due to a lack of imagination or effort. This week is the first for a long time [four weeks, more?] when too many deadlines to reasonably handle have not been trailing me. I spent today [Monday] sleeping in, worked a little, scootered around town, collected cash from some clients, came home, cooked, read, took out the trash, bought some coffee and settled down for an hour or two's work ahead of a swim, and then came home to this. I don't have a boss, and work in my study or anywhere else I set up my notebook. I know how lucky I am, but I also know my story, although I almost never think about it.

Power laws and the failures necessary for success were also explored in this earlier post: The myth of 1,000 true fans

My life as a test subject

Eigenfaces from Wikipedia

I volunteered to take part in an MRI-based study on face recognition / memory out of interest and for the $, which I immediately went to a cafe to spend on espresso and alcohol. I also hoped they'd let me know if they found a tumor or some other abnormality, like a massively enlarged pituitary gland, lit up like Las Vegas.

I worried slightly about claustraphobia, although I've never suffered from it before, so I took the last Xanax in my pill box and it kicked in just as they were explaining the procedure to me. I was relaaaaxed in the machine and even enjoyed the noise, which sounded like the intro to a Daft Punk show. Like an idiot, as I was led into the room I asked if 'the music' was part of the test.

I was in the machine for 30 minutes, and they stuck in a 6 minute 'rest period' between the practice and actual tests, during which I put myself into a trance and tripped out / fell asleep. I'm really interested in the results, which will be sent to me in a few weeks.

I ought to donate my whole body to science well before death, but I'm sure that I'm now on a university hospital blacklist.

But the summer / early fall mad rush is over, and I've lots of time for things that can't be easily explained.

Huge post from someone else

This is supposed to be part of a post on Henry Miller, but it can come in two or three parts.

Terry Rossio wrote a lot of successful movies, and this is a piece he wrote called Throw in the Towel, at a blog I can no longer access [maybe you can, but in Taiwan, from this machine, no]. It starts like this:

You don’t get to hear the truth much in this town, so listen up. I’m gonna back up the truck and unload. Harsh truths, right here, right now. And we’re gonna start with the most brutal: You people really aren’t much good at writing screenplays.

In fact, your writing pretty much sucks.

I tried to be different. I tried to leave the door cracked open a bit. I politely asked you to send me only good stuff, your best stuff. And for years now I’ve been deluged by a storm of crappy query letters and mind-numbing script submissions. So many I can’t keep up, can’t even respond to them all. And not one of them has been any damn good.
Now I’m about ready to slam the door shut, and lock it down like how they do in cartoons, with a whole series of barricades and bolts and latches and such.

It’s disappointing. Especially after offering all this advice and encouragement. But man, I’m tired. Tired of being informative and helpful and optimistic. Tired of wasting my time answering your pedestrian-at-best e-mails and faxes and message board questions.

Tired of inventing nice ways to avoid telling you all that your writing sucks.
Hollywood, it is said, is the only place where you can die of encouragement.
Well, not here. Not anymore.

Your writing sucks.

You simply cannot write to a professional level. And you probably never will. It’s a safe bet to say that none of you will ever make a sale, anywhere, anytime; to think otherwise is just deluding yourselves. It’s a waste of your time, and that pains me, and it’s a waste of my time, and that pains me more.

Got it?

Oh, of course not. I knew you wouldn’t. I know you people all too well.

It's 5,500 words long, and it doesn't seem to be available elsewhere, so I've uploaded a WORD file to Google Docs, here.

But what goes on

Jane Birkin & Brian Ferry "In every dream home a heartache"

Sometimes I can only listen to one song all day, again and again and again.

In the process of shedding skins, although it may just be another mid-life crisis / breakdown.

Taiwan is forgiving.

EDIT: Wrote /posted the above late last night, a little drunk after a long bike ride, which is all cool, but in the morning it reads slightly alarming. There's nothing wrong with a small crisis and breakdown now and then, as generally they're just milestones on a path of interesting changes that I observe as much as order. And these days my idea of a breakdown is just the collapse of one system or outlook and the emergence of another. Nothing to fear, and much to enjoy.

This is just the result of physical+mental relief+relaxation at the end of a huge piece of work, waking up at the end the summer with my aims achieved and various attractions laid out in front of me. Now I wait and see what happens next.

El hombre invisible

Always the romantic, Lester [Bangs] viewed [Richard] Meltzer, [Nick] Tosches, and himself as heirs to the Beats. He claimed the mantle of Jack Kerouac. Meltzer he named Neal Cassady, and Tosches became William S. Burroughs. Nobody wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.
Let it Blurt (the life and times of Lester Bangs), Jim DeRogatis, p91

Finally done editing the textbooks and now want to spend as long as possible away from this machine. Just work on paper, in cafes and the garden, or sprawled on the daybed with a fan.

Raw power

Primal Scream - Accelerator

Summer's end

Huge backlog of work almost done, and so the 7am starts and night time finishes are over, and I can start enjoying my life and this city again.

In England the end of summer is always sad, because it's so short and a long, dreary season is all that's ahead until next May, at best. Out here the summer is the worst season, so hot and wet, and the rest of the year is just warm. Also, being just in the tropics, there's barely any change in hrs of daylight. In this way time feels more linear than circular, and it's easy to wake up two or three years later with few points of reference for all the times past.

The Beatles - Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows

The loss of normal responsibility

Ryan (2003) describes the tourist as a ‘displaced’ person: the traveler finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings, without being obliged to daily routines, thus being more susceptible to hedonism and the loss of normal responsibility.

The Roles of Perceived Risk, Travel Motivation and Perception Image on Destination Choice and Travel Satisfaction: A Hierarchical Model Approach, by Wann-Yin Wu, Hsiao-Yun Lu, and Sein Htaik [unpublished]

These last two weeks I've been up at 7am, coffee, starting work at the desk at 7:45 and on / off until at least 8pm, then a swim, then back to work for an hour or two if not out to a pub.

I've got all the usual papers on the go, plus six English for Special Purposes textbooks that are badly and / or half written to try and pull into shape for the local university on six wholly different domains, each with 16 classes of material.

While it's a little intimidating there are moments of pure Zen flow when things get done in the office and then it's out for a meeting or class that flies by full of interest, and money in envelopes, turning up in my account, like drinking water from a fire hose, but able to keep up, and as much as possible I surround myself with friends and / or beautiful women. An empty head can be a happy one.

Also running certain experiments on myself, which I'll get into in a later post. But am generally in a pseudo-manic phase, with all the superficial elements but none of the genuine mania. It's like I'm observing myself from inside and out, unconcerned with what's happening, controlled by forces that are unconscious and probably almost wholly external. A willing puppet of forces unseen, like spastic dancing on mdma, the realization of what just happened coming sometime after the event.

So I have this loss of normal responsibility, because at the most elated moments on the line just at the edge of chaos / order, where all the cool stuff happens, things neither breaking down nor boring, I seem to be able to give up choices beyond i) work hard, ii) exercise / eat right, and iii) try and be nice. The idea of this game being that you set up very simple systems and then release them into the wild, and see what happens over a period of time, making small adjustments all the while and clear in the knowledge that if one system is grasped for too long then failure is assured. The only way to not lose face is to tear off the old one on a regular basis, and not linger on the past.

Deeper ecology

Carl Zimmer writes:

We are, fundamentally, a fusion. As I wrote in my essay [subscription req'd - I don't have one] for Science on the origin of eukaryotes, there's now a wealth of evidence that our cells evolved from the combination of two different microbes. The mitochondria that generate fuel for our cells started out as free-living bacteria. Today, they still retain traces of their origin in the bacterial DNA they carry, as well as their bacterial structure, including the membrane within a membrane that envelops them.
...
In today's issue of Nature, James Lake [of the University of California, Los Angeles, a veteran researcher on the early history of life] questions whether we may be too quick to assume that only eukaryotes are the result of fusion. He observes that aphids depend on a species of bacterium called Buchnera to digest their food, and Buchnera in turn contains other bacteria on which its own survival depends. These two bacteria are still distinct enough from each other that we can tell them apart. But what if two bacteria joined together billions of years ago and their identities blurred together? How would we tell them apart?
...
When scientists dredge up muck from the ocean floor, for example, they often find different species of microbes living together in tight clumps. They have to live close to other species to survive because each species takes care of chemical reactions that their partners can't carry out on their own. That intimacy makes it easier for individual genes to move from host to host, as viruses infect different microbes or as microbes die and other microbes slurp up their genes.
...
Our cells, in other words, are not just microbes within microbes; they are microbes within microbes within microbes: a true Russian doll of evolution.

Microbes Within Microbes Within Microbes

Slightly related post: Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices

Dry drunk

The typhoon broke this tree, but plants are relentless, and it'll come back even stronger.

At the end of the fourth day with no running water in town, and patience is starting to run out.

We collect rain water and use it sparingly.

This is how some people live all the time, and it can be done, if you lower your standards and drink more beer than water.

Cabin fever

the shining

Into the third day of typhoon rain, and I wouldn't be surprised if tonight's news reports don't see a leap in overdoses, ax murders and deaths by sexual misadventure. Cabin fever is setting in, and if there were two or three months of this then something would break - hopefully my current incarnation - with a new one, better suited to the change in scene, emerging from the dead skin. And then the season would change, and I'd be stuck working from another out-dated and inappropriate model. I'm never going to work at a polar base station.

Wrote the above, saved it, but the rain has now stopped, and the streets are just damp and full of debris. Over 2m of rain fell in some areas of Taiwan, and there's lots of flooding and pieces to pick up. There's also no water in town, supplies cut - floodwater contamination - for perhaps the next five days. Always a thrill at the height of summer.

EDIT: We don't have a TV, so I had no idea of the destruction across the island. Not good.

Luring disco dollies to a life of vice

soft cell - sex dwarf

...the tough guy knows when a point has been made, and can feel when the hairs on the forearms of the audience rise in sympathy and response. The typical audience is composed of amateur enthusiasts looking for excitement, and don’t talk about intonation or rubato...

Mike Thorne, producer of Non-stop Erotic Cabaret

Inertia / momentum

Philip Larkin dated the start of the 60s [sex] to 1963, and the end has been put at Altamont [1969] or when Haight Ashbury began attracting tourists and runaways from the midwest [1968, in Jane Didion's account], but I remember reading somewhere that for the Rolling Stones the sixties didn't end until the early seventies, around Exile on Main St / Cocksucker Blues. The point being that things don't follow a neat timeline, there's intertia / momentum, and the landmarks we set up are all just points of departure, convenient half-truths, like most of our perceptions.

All through my early + mid-20s I was a fairly typical under-skilled and over-employed liberal arts grad, and then when I was 26 I quit my job and spent the next few years traveling and getting more heavily into not working and over-partying, and there were many occasions when I should have died, been horrifically injured or imprisoned, all through stupidity rather than daring.

I think this is a good way to spend your twenties, if you can find a way out at the end, but that generally means not getting in too deep, not having as much fun as you could. Because the people who have a lot of fun, the ones who take a happily irresponsible attitude toward drink, drugs, sex, and so on to its logical conclusion - happiness being a button that you hit again and again - well, there are many traps along the way.

But then not following those lines of inquiry may leave you open to easy regrets, which can last for the rest of your life. And there are traps all over the place, in the quietest, safest lives you know.

So when I was 30 I wanted to get my life together, because I thought in neat, 10-year units. I skidded on haphazardly until at least 33, and then slowly pulled things into some kind of order, to the point they are now [39], when I'm married, have permanent residency and do my own thing with regard to time / $. But even in periods of seeming inertia things are churning beneath the surface. Nothing is consciously willed into being at the moment of decision or action. Which means that although I have no idea what will happen next, most of it has already started.

Related post: Monkey orgasm button

How many?

"[Taiji Tonoyma - a Japanese actor - asked] ...tell me Mr Miller, how many women do you think you've slept with in your life?" I was, of course, embarrassed, you know, and also puzzled. And I said, "Well, I've never thought about that, maybe 40 or 50." "What," he said, "I've slept myself with maybe 250, you know, and you, with your reputation, you must have had a thousand."

Henry Miller, 6 minutes or so into the clip above [part 1 of 3]

I'm 37- Clerks

Related post: Guardian sex survey

The secret of my success

bardot + birkin, via if charlie parker was a gunslinger... (good images every day)

I am quite certain that the most important reason for my having known some success is that I have had no competition.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion p207

Team Venter making history

biomimicry, by jude buffum

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

From George Dyson's introduction to A short course on synthetic genomics [July, 2009, Edge Masterclass], presented by Craig Venter and George Church. Videos [mostly difficult for me to understand on one watch] and a pdf from an earlier, related event, at the link

Richard Dawkins interviews Venter [2008, BBC], touring his lab. Much easier.

Self similar and out of sight

Ringo playing bongos, Paul and someone else in the glass

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had-- the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no-- and when he got to know the school's Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual.

We are Fractal Sheep, Paul Spinrad

The post isn't very long, and the good stuff is mostly extracted above, but I like it a lot. I like it because I lean toward the society of the mind, but also because of the social aspects of the above, the similar iterations at all scales of the same types and conflicts. Think of The Beatles: the cute one, the quiet one, the smart one, the funny one.

Of course, those labels were too glib, they were all cute, quiet, smart and funny, but everyone gets labeled in a group, and everyone ends up playing a role or two. The self is socially constructed, which is why solitude has traditionally been a tool to break it, either as punishment or spiritual discipline.

From another angle, the perceptions others have of you are obviously the reality of how you're perceived. If the people who know you think that you're a jerk, then you're a jerk, and only a change in your behavior is likely to alter that perception to any significant degree among any significant number of people. And I write this as someone who has often, and with good cause, been seen as a jerk.

Plants have many qualities, but we tend to focus on only one or two for even species of considerable interest, defining them solely in those terms. The reality of all plants - and by extension, all animals, including [naturally] all humans - is far richer than perceived by even the most patient and generous observer. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter.

Head spaces

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper.

Beautiful video [worth enlarging] described like this at the source:

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

The section with the grass, plane and cloud [0:30 - 1:00] looks / sounds / feels / like entering salvia space.

All life is a process of breaking down

crack-up cut-up by they poured fire on us from the sky [click to enlarge]

Fitzgerald, in contrast, comes across as a well-meaning but annoying fellow who hero-worshiped the wrong people, and who consistently sabotaged himself by getting drunk and behaving like a fool.

From Michiko Kakutani's review of Hemingway vs Fitzgerald

Related: Full text of The Crack-Up here

From practice to theory

Back in Osaka for two days before Taiwan, with the [real] joy of karaoke waiting at the end of the day.

The first paragraph of the excerpt, below, overstates the case in suggesting that theoretical knowledge can never lead to practical applications, but the rest adds some modifiers to soften this claim.

The biggest myth I’ve encountered in my life is as follows: that the road from practical know-how to theoretical knowledge is reversible—in other words, that theoretical knowledge can lead to practical applications, just as practical applications can lead to theoretical knowledge. After all, this is the reason we have schools, universities, professors, research centers, homework, exams, essays, dissertations, and the strange brand of individuals called “economists.”

Yet the strange thing is that it is very hard to realize that knowledge cannot travel equally in both directions. It flows better from practice to theory—but to understand it you have nontheoretical knowledge. And people who have nontheoretical knowledge don’t think of these things.

Indeed, if knowledge flowed equally in both directions, then theory without experience should be equivalent to experience without theory—which is not the case.

Nassim Taleb, excerpted from a forward to a book, pdf here

Some related posts:
Practice / Theory
Theory / Practice
Big fat lie

We eat death

Ecosystem on a tree near a temple in Himeji

Went to a temple in one of the hills around Himej. Every time I visit a temple I get more into the plants around the place than the buildings. At the moment I have a thing for mosses and ferns - the early plants, before flowers.


They also have some good cacti - the most recent addition to the plant kingdom [I've read] - at the Himeji Botanical Garden, as the town is twinned with Phoenix, Arizona, and on my last trip I bought two very mature Lophophora williamsii, each as big as a fist. Taking them through customs was as much excitement as I can bear, although cleaned of soil they're probably legal, as the same plants can be bought in Taiwanese markets at three or four times the price.

Above is a picture of moss growing on a tree stump and around a stone that was cut for the temple. These plants are relentless. They bear a lot of weight and bounce back and just keep growing. I took some from the gardens at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Nara, and with any luck I'll get it through customs and it'll take in Taiwan. I play for team DNA.


Replace the suit and tie with jeans and an aloha, and the hair with a shaved head, in true Mishima style, and you have me eating salami and drinking beer in Japan as much as possible. I eat death.

Memory loss

The Chinese character for alcohol [jiu], photographed from an Osaka restaurant sign and cleaned up on a computer, with the face and bottle added to make it mine

Was walking in Himeji and managed to lose a small folder of index cards full of notes. I retraced my steps, but no luck, and then the only thing I wanted was for it to be found by someone with no English abilities and / or immediately trashed.

I bought a notebook and tried to remember what I'd written, but there was too much and it was gone. Before writing there were oral traditions, and at other times people worked on complex mnemonic systems and memory palaces, but I've always been too lazy to try any of these methods, and, like nearly all skills, have worked on the assumption that just knowing how something is done is good enough. I have plenty of theories, but little practical experience, which explains a lot about who I am and how I came to be.

I bought a notebook and began writing again. Pen and paper are an extension of my brain, as much an augmentation as a memory chip, regardless of how little visible progress is actually made.

Related: To the brain, tools are temporary body parts [Discover]

Cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Osaka cab view

In Himeji, on total down time, riding a simple bicycle and doing nothing. I think I may've outgrown the idea that a vacation should be judged by how many intoxicants are consumed and how much sex is had. All of this just ahead of my [next] mid-life crisis, which should see a tremendous regression on all fronts.

The contrast with last summer could hardly be greater, when I was working all the time and feeling wasted. I have work with me here, but it's an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so at night.

Previous research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...

These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.

Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia

Related posts:
Impelled by convention

To hell with authenticity