Moon River: Theory

Getting Evolution Up to Speed

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:37:24 GMT

"People like to think of modern human biology, and especially mental biology, as being the result of selections that took place 100,000 years ago," said University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn. "But our research shows that humans are still under selection, not just for things like disease resistance but for cognitive abilities."

Lahn recently published the results of a study demonstrating that two key genes connected to brain size are currently under rapid selection in populations throughout the globe.

Some radical thinkers suggest human evolution needs to move even faster, with a little help from science.

"Biological evolution is too slow for the human species," said Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author of The Singularity Is Near. "Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust." READ ALL

via anomalist

The Laws of Simplicity

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:11:57 GMT

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

The Laws of Simplicity (via bifurcated rivets)

photographs by Candida Höfer. Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien X, 2003 (via thenonist)

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.>>>

Forming a Thought

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:56:34 GMT

by Nita L. Sturiale

Nature is a continuous transformation of energy, from galactic motion to starlight to tree to seasonal cycles to human to idea. Though genes and culture are intimately linked the rate at which they each evolve is different. Though culture changes very quickly it is limited by the inherent abilities of brains. The interaction between individual brains and cultural information is a dynamic system of transformation and change. This continuous system moves with wavelike patterns.

/\ Slice from large-scale map of known Universe by M. Geller and J. Huchra
- dots indicate galaxies.Every organism is a living map of time and interaction in nature.

Every artwork and sciencework is a physical record of memories, ideas and information. They are also maps of the human brain. Anything that records an interaction, the movement of one thing through another, can be considered a map. The neuronal connections that represent the growth and learning one has experienced throughout life, a series of stroboscopic photographs of a milk drop falling through air, the path of ones footsteps through a park, each is a map of interaction. As the cut marks of a figure skater's path through ice store information about the speed, direction and weight of the body, a map stores information about its creator. Maps are the external storage of memories. These external databases enable an organism to compare past and distant events with present ones. In the case of land maps, users can locate where they are now, where they have been and where they might want to go. Brain maps can be images of the physical structures of the brain as well as show complicated interconnections of an individual brain's neuronal pathways.>>

Human Time Travel This Century

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 08:29:35 GMT

call me childish, an escapist, but i would love to beleive in IT:

Ronald Mallett, Professor at the University of Connecticut, has used Einstein’s equations to design a time machine with circulating laser beams. While his team is still looking for funding, he hopes to build and test the device in the next 10 years. {via reality carnival}

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 21:09:01 GMT

You are extremely bad both at judging how happy that thing with make you, and how long the happiness you do get will last.

How we forecast our feelings, and whether those predictions match our future emotional states, had never been the stuff of laboratory research.

via itchyrobot

expanding-universe

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 06:54:28 GMT

Galaxy evolution in cyber universe matches astronomical observations in fine detail

Scientists at the University of Chicago have bolstered the case for a popular scenario of the big bang theory that neatly explains the arrangement of galaxies throughout the universe. Their supercomputer simulation shows how dark matter, an invisible material of unknown composition, herded luminous matter in the universe from its initial smooth state into the cosmic web of galaxies and galaxy clusters that populate the universe.

2.1 Billion Years After the Big Bang (via robotwisdom)

and not moving very far, here is An Atlas of the Universe:

The Atlas of the Universe, is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe. via Plep

The Universe within 1 billion Light Years
The Neighbouring Superclusters

into the future

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 00:41:33 GMT

So many assumptions and theories and visionary that has to do with the our planet, with our future, here are some illustrative ones.

A historical timeline that steps into the future:

via thingsmagazine

This is the way the World may look like 50 million years from now

This map is taken from the PALEOMAP Project site,this project tries to illustrate the plate
tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years... Also includes: Future Maps show ing positions of continents in the future and formation of "Pangea Ultima
via huge-entity

Divine inspiration

Fri, 26 May 2006 06:33:51 GMT

It's the vital ingredient of creativity, but what exactly is this thing called inspiration? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips seeks its source while diverse artists from all fields reveal how the muse strikes them ... The Observer

via rodcorp

The twilight zone of thought

Thu, 25 May 2006 09:04:22 GMT

The opinions of experts on profound issues of love, consciousness, existence of God. Paradoxically, the rational as well as the irrational mind reaches a similar conclusion though from the opposite directions. What is then the path to truth?

via edge

super highway

Wed, 17 May 2006 21:37:57 GMT

Catherine Opie Untitled #2 from "Freeway" series 1994 platinum print

Highways of the Mind: The Haunting of the Superhighway From the World's Fair to the World Wide Web by Helen J Burgess

"Our highways are haunted. Ghosts peer at us from the roadsides in the frail shapes of white crosses bedecked with plastic flowers.
Our roads have always been haunted by ghosts - of bandits, pilgrims, and beasts that come out in the night... Highways have thus been both exciting and fearful places, pointing us towards an uncertain future destination, while waylaying us along the roadside with tales of woe or wonder."

Untitled #30 from "Freeway" Series, IRIS print, 1997

"In the last years of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, highways have morphed from concrete and steel to virtual superhighways, a sometimes ill-fitting, and other times apt, analogy. In this way, the figure of the highway has begun to be visualized in terms of its ghostly other, a wired-up high-bandwidth network which promises to move information at "the speed of light." The highway, attempting to evade the ghostly labor of its creators and its more recently documented environmental impact, has tried to become something both more and less than material."

"The highway, then, is interesting precisely because it overlaps machinic and cybernetic, material and immaterial, modern and postmodern divides. Taking a closer look, I believe, at the ways in which our "highways of the mind" have changed, and the ways in which they remain familiar, might give us a better sense of the ongoing recombination of elements that go into the production of history. In other words, the highway helps complicate the tendency we have to align the modern-material-machinic against the postmodern-immaterial-cybernetic, as if these two sets of categories were mutually exclusive and the first had ceased to be relevant. If the highway straddles a digital or postmodern divide, then perhaps it also helps to give us a sense of what is continuous: the tension between hierarchical and nodal ways of structuring materials, subjects and ideologies. ..Most importantly, an analysis of our highways of the mind might protect us from the most dangerous haunting of all - the haunting of technology by the ghost of linear progress."

David Maisel. Sanctuary and the Modern Metropolis

"..virtual highway has not normalized the landscape. Unlike the railroad, which brought about the standardization of world time zones (Kern, 2), the virtual highway mixes up all places and times into a hodge-podge of images and associations through the gradual accretion of contradictory ideas, so that the act of experiencing the highway is the act of experiencing all its cultural associations at once. In fact, it contributes to what Jacques Derrida calls "the irreducible virtualization of time and space.... Although we can use the highway as an historical, cultural marker, we can also read it as a site which attracts a richness of contradictory notions: a site upon which to read the inherent paradoxes built into our relations with technology and the environment. In this way time is collapsed; the virtualization of time and space means we experience the highway with its narrativized past and future together, simultaneously imagining it as the path to a golden"

Zen And The Art Of LA Freeway Interchange

WHY SEX

Fri, 05 May 2006 10:51:36 GMT

"Computers have made it possible to explore the consequences of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple things in a way never before possible ... this new capability for observations makes possible significant insights into phenomena long felt to be complex for serious analysis." - Insights ...

So, why won't we check it on SEX?

A biologist of University of Houston, Ricardo Azevedo created a computer model of genetic interactions to study the evolution of a simple organism under several sets of conditions. He explains the evolutionary advantage of sex, and why we're not all asexual clones. read all

LOUIS-PHILIPPE CÔTÉ Feitiço (2004) Oil on wood

The Formula for Happiness

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 06:48:23 GMT

"Eduardo Punset's "El viaje a la felicidad". What seems at first to be an inspirational/self-help/crap book is, after all, a mildly enjoyable study on the keys to human happiness based on scientific data." via claudia.weblog

Where:

E, the multiplier, is the emotion/enthusiasm with which we live.
M means maintenance or attention to detail. See the tree and not the forest. Focus on the essential and not on the important.
B is for the quest for happiness. The quest and the anticipation bring more happiness than the attainment in itself.
P stands for Personal Relationships (a whole book could be devoted to this theme and I doubt the equation would be as simple ;-)

R stands for the reducing factors:
- Not being able to "unlearn" or not being able of getting rid of pre-concepts.
- Basing decision on the group's memory instead of one's experience.
- Interfering with automated psychological processes, trying to manipulate the feelings and reactions.
- Having fear.

C stands for genetic and other inherited factors.

Strategic Sustainable Brain

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 19:40:02 GMT

"The human brain faces a challenging future. To cope with accelerating nanotech- and biotech-based developments in an increasingly complex world, compete with emerging superintelligence, and maintain its performance and sustainability as people live longer, the fragile human brain will need major enhancements: a backup system, eliminating degenerative processes, direct mind-linkup to ubiquitous computing networks, error-correction for memory, and a global Net connection with remote neural access."

"...the brain needs to accelerate with the rate of technological change, as our vision and audition have through innovative corrective technologies, and our arms and legs have with robotic prosthetics, and as other parts of our bodies have transformed and renewed in working together to keep us alive..."

(via) Go (PDF files)

The Secret Power of Beauty - Thinking about Thinking

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:53:49 GMT

In his Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley proposes that our capacity to reason and even our senses are governed by mental patterns, perceptual sets, that determine the limits of what the mind can conceive. The mind uses a taxonomy--a set of categories--into which it squashes the somewhat messier occurences of life, that not only shapes what we think but what we can think. via Brain Clouds

John Armstrong's sais:

In one of his more memorable --- but typically obscure--- formulations, Hegel writes that: 'The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk.' What is the thought behind this poetic image, an image which is supposed to communicate something important about the nature of philosophy? Hegel was obsessed by one of the big problems of thinking and, by extension, of writing. The 'owl of Minerva' stands for the process of understanding. So, he says, we begin to understand what it is we are interested in only as we approach the end of our inquiry.

This is to contradict one of the most beguiling ideals of philosophy. Couldn't we start with absolutely clear and precise propositions ----as Descartes did when he tried to deduce every important truth from the simplest and clearest of starting points: 'I think, therefore I am'? To apply the point locally: couldn't we first of all say what beauty is and then move on to a discussion of its significance?.

Less idealistic, Hegel's point reflects a painful fact. We start in confusion, so we cannot immediately come up with the right definitions. Sadly, knowing where to start is something we only really see afterwards ---when, of course, it is too late. It is only at dusk that we become wise ----by which time we have already had to endure our own midday follies.

The Secret Power of Beauty (About Aesthetic Concepts)

via junk for code

Beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-and-space-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being. Terence McKenna via random walks

Sex, Drugs and Trading Stocks

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:19:54 GMT

What do sex, drugs and trading stocks have in common?

According to an article written by Adam Levy of Bloomberg that is currently circulating around the world's newspapers, quite a bit.

Late at night, in a basement laboratory at Stanford University, Brian Knutson made a startling discovery: Our brains lust after money, just like they crave sex....
The pleasure of orgasm, the high from cocaine, the rush of buying Google Inc. at $450 a share -- the same neural network governs all three, Knutson, 38, concluded. What's more, our primal pleasure circuits can, and often do, override our seat of reason, the brain's frontal cortex, the professor says. In other words, stocks, like sex, sometimes drive us crazy. Read All

being good without god

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:35:17 GMT

an interview with Edward O. Wilson at meaning of life tv (which has lots of great interviews).

on being good without god

on science and religion

I loved the interview with Joseph Goldstein, a Buddhist, co founder of the Insight Meditation Society

and Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a professor of theology, about the religious experience, truth and God and Sex (as the primordial manifestation of the quest for religious and the divine)

At the meaningoflife.tv, there are many more interesting broadcast over topics, such as:

Is mysticism an enemy of rationalism?, Is consciousness a mystery?

Does mind pervade the universe? what is god?

via The Daily Transcript

Will this Power source turn physics on its head?

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:55:08 GMT

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head. More in Here

The International Flat Earth Society:-)

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:03:52 GMT

"The facts are simple," says Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society. "The earth is flat."

"Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world," he contends. "The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I'd say that the dome of heaven is about 4,000 miles away, and the stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston." more

Tears of Laughter

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:11:51 GMT

“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.”

With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalen”?

In the history of art there are very few images of people laughing.

Nearly half a millennium after Leonardo, contemporary scientists have discovered a neurological explanation for the affinity between physical expressions and emotional sensations of joy and grief.

Charles Darwin notably fused the two approaches, using the art of photography to further his scientific inquiry. In order to formulate The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) with scientific veracity, Darwin broke with both schematic artistic representations of the passions and aristocratic conventions preventing extreme displays of emotion. He hoped to use photography to portray emotional subtleties – like the close similarity between the laughing and crying face – with a renewed realism.

Darwin described the spasms a laughing fit provoked, which would have rendered any photograph a blur: “During excessive laughter the whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed. The respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Tears are freely shed,” he noted, appending a key observation, “Hence . . . it is scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tear-stained face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a bitter crying-fit”.

Darwin found a ready-made solution to the problem of how to capture raw expression in a set of extraordinary pictures taken by the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne and reproduced in his book, Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine (1862). ...

Why would the uncanny similarity between the expressions of laughter and crying have so intrigued Darwin? In short, it helped confirm his theory of evolution. Darwin thought that monkeys, like humans, laughed... Along the way, however, Darwin noted that apes didn’t shed any tears when they laughed. ...

Over last few years, surgeons and scientists, dealing with people who suffer for instence: epilepcy and Parkinson, have most probably made new discoveries: or what they called the “laughter center,” a piece of the brain roughly one inch square, in which our sense of humor seems to be located. and the “crying center,” source of all our misery and grief. It turns out these points abut each other in the left-frontal lobe of the brain, and their close proximity provided neuroscientists with a clue as to why laughing and crying are so interconnected. Read all

On happiness

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:25:29 GMT

Happiness, is not a feeling or an experience, it is an ethical state of being. It means judging that you have made the right choices and done the right things, and enjoyed a measure of luck along the way. Where and when you are born, how the play of daily contingency affects you, do not determine your happiness, but they do constrain it. And so it often seems as though the choices of everyday life, cosmically small though they are, matter far more than events in distant capitals and war zones.

But here is the key point. You must live your entire life with honour and commitment. You must try to build something larger than yourself: a community of citizens, a community of reason, a just and peaceful world. You may be defeated, because violence, arrogance and unreason are powerful forces in history. But that does not diminish your responsibility" Aristotle

via something beautiful

Hyperspace Ship?

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 06:52:46 GMT

According to the Heim quantum theory (HQT) developed in the 1950s, it should be possible to build an 'hyperspace' engine allowing a spacecraft to reach Mars in 3 hours. It would also allow us to travel to stars more that 10 light years away in 80 days by slipping into a different dimension. But is interstellar space travel a dream or a future reality? It all depends if this controversial theory about the fabric of our universe is correct or not. So far, it seems that a majority of physicists thinks that this theory is either incomplete or almost understandable. Nevertheless, some scientists working for the U.S. Department of Energy think that such an 'hyperspace' engine could be tested within five years.

An extraordinary "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. via

Continue reading "Hyperspace Ship?"

Can we hear the sound of silence?

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:48:58 GMT

For years philosophers have meditated over the sound of one hand clapping.

Now scientists believe they have shown the brain remains in listening mode even when the only sound is silence. more...via mindhacks

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:55:59 GMT

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true? Welcome to "dangerous ideas". This Question was address to Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, etc..

one of the interesting ideas i (no wonder) found: "The Landscape" but many many more are just waiting to be read....

Living forever

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 04:55:13 GMT

Raymond Kurzweil (b.1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical
character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech
recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is
the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence,
transhumanism, and the technological singularity.

i had uploaded an interesting article about singularity before.

Raymond Kurzweil is one of the most fascinating, skillful
and award winning in futuristic vision of the world, that
developed cutting edge technologies, as well as best sellers
books, that the text here below is taken from his latest book:
"The Singularity Is Near," a road map to "a unique event with
singular implications," or some form of immortality for those
younger than 50 today.

Kurzweil takes human evolution far beyond today's
most optimistic forecasts. These hold that anyone born
today will live to be 130 and productive to 110, and those born
in the 22nd century will live to 250. The glass-half-full-and-filling
geomancers of the human genome research world can perceive
"immortality" in the 23rd century. Kurzweil's sees the same
evolution achieving a similar breakthrough for the children and
grandchildren of the post-World War II baby boomers.

The event Kurzweil envisages - the "singularity" - is when
technological change becomes so rapid and profound that our
bodies and brains merge with our machines. Singularity depicts
what life will be like after the brain-machine fusion takes place
and our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality.

This moment that Kurzweil sees coming 20 years hence is when
our intelligence becomes non-biological and trillions of times more
powerful than unaided human intelligence. What this will mean for
humanity is that aging can be reversed, pollution eradicated,
hunger solved and our bodies and the environment transformed
by nanotechnology that will also overcome the limitations of biology
- and death.

Bill Gates praises futurist Kurzweil and his "Singularity" as "the
best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence."
He has a 20-year track record of accurate predictions.

to his site

Alan Watts Lecture Series

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:09:58 GMT

Alan Watts (1915-1973) who held both a master’s degree in theology
and a doctorate of divinity, is best known as an interpreter of Zen
Buddhism in particular, and Indian and Chinese philosophy in general.
He authored more than 20 excellent books on the philosophy and psychology
of religion, and lectured extensively, leaving behind a vast audio archive.

(Click for mp3 audio archive)

He's got such a relaxing voice! via loreto

BT Technology Timeline 2006-2051

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:49:12 GMT

BT Technology Timeline 2006-2051 It's interesting to see a major company such as BT set a
timeline such as this, especially as they say thier 1990 timeline has had
around 80% accuracy. They predict a supercomputer as powerful as the
human mind in 2006, self aware computers that pass the turing test by 2020,
and the rise of a global computer dictator by and artificial brain around 2040.
After that its hard to predict, you know with the singularity coming and all...
Some of the interesting things they predict: genetically engineered teddy bears; androids
form 10% of the population around 2015; the Matrix is created, 2030; thought recognition
as input device by 2014; via

Compulsory Ink Blot Test

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:02:56 GMT

Some compulsory psychoanalysis today, brought to you in the form of these haunting ink-blot art works. What do you perceive as those black pearls of infinity deeply penetrate your visual centres?

haunting ink-blot art works

via huge-entity

The Image Culture

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:35:00 GMT

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana in late August, images of the immense devastation were immediately available to anyone with a television set or an Internet connection.

But how did this saturation of images influence our understanding of what happened in New Orleans and elsewhere? How did the speed with which the images were disseminated alter the humanitarian and political response to the disaster? And how, in time, will these images influence our cultural memory of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina?Such questions could be asked of any contemporary disaster—and often have been, especially in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., which forever etched in public memory the image of the burning Twin Towers. But the average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards.

“In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too,” novelist Don DeLillo observed.

Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type. On flickr.com, a photo-sharing website, you can type in a word such as “love” and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in “terror” and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. “Remember when this was a shocking image?” asks the person who posted the picture.

Today, anyone with a digital camera and a personal computer can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual capitulation of the printed word to pictures, particularly moving pictures—the ceding of text to image, which might be likened not to a defeated political candidate ceding to his opponent, but to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.

Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind’s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images. In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is “better than print,” as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies—perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms.

French critic Roland Barthes fretted that “the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.” In a more recent iteration of the same idea, technology critic Paul Virilio identified a “great threat to the word” in the “evocative power of the screen.” “It is real time that threatens writing,” he noted, “once the image is live, there is a conflict between deferred time and real time, and in this there is a serious threat to writing and to the author.” via

All Models are Wrong

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:15:11 GMT

Thoughtful leaders increasingly recognize that we are not only failing to solve the persistent problems we face, but are in fact causing them. System dynamics is designed to help avoid such policy resistance and identify high leverage policies for sustained improvement. Understanding complex systems requires mastery of concepts such as feedback, stocks and flows, time delays, and nonlinearity. Research shows these concepts are highly counterintuitive and poorly understood. It also shows how they can be taught and learned. Doing so requires the use of formal models and simulations to test our mental models and develop our intuition about complex systems. Yet, though essential, these concepts and tools are not sufficient. Becoming an effective systems thinker also requires the rigorous and disciplined use of scientific inquiry skills so that we can uncover our hidden assumptions and biases. It requires respect and empathy for others and other viewpoints. Most important, and most difficult to learn, systems thinking requires understanding that all models are wrong and humility about the limitations of our knowledge. Such humility is essential in creating an environment in which we can learn about the complex systems in which we are embedded and work effectively to create the world we truly desire. The paper is based on the talk Sterman, John D. delivered at the 2002 International System Dynamics Conference upon presentation of the Jay W. Forrester Award.

PDF full version

the “Logic Alphabet”

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:57:35 GMT

introduction to the crystallography of logic

In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic.Guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic.

In this sense his whole approach is similar to the ideas developed by the great nineteenth and early twentieth century pedagogues Friedrich Froebel and Maria Montessori, who founded the Kindergarten movement and the Montessori school system, respectively. Both believed that higher-level conceptual thought should be preceded by concrete hands-on play with geometric forms embodied in solid materials.

Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet is based on a crystal-like arrangement of its elements. Thus where the traditional approach to logic is purely abstract, Zellweger’s is geometric, making it amenable to visual play.While constituting a genuine research project in logic, his notebooks (made between 1953 and 1975) have remarkable visual appeal, passing through phases reminiscent of Russian Constructivism, outsider art, concrete poetry and pop. These days we accept outsider artists, and are perhaps aware of outsider scientists, but Zellweger may be the first we could define as an outsider logician.

After half a century of obscurity, Zellweger’s work is starting to attract the attention of some mathematicians who believe it offers an exciting new perspective on logic.

The history of logic is very interesting, and has undergone many phases. In the Western world, it began about 2500 years ago when the Greeks were developing a new form of civic structure in which debate and argumentation replaced allegience to tradition as the major political tools. Slowly philosophers realized that, if laws were to be based on the outcome of arguments, an understanding of how valid arguments are actually constructed was crucial. Formal logic began when thinkers like Aristotle started using simple diagrams, like the famous Logic Square, to study these structures. This was an amazing innovation because it involved applying a mixture of algebra and geometry to the study of language, that is, language in its role as the medium of argumentation.

"I think of logical structures as figures of thought, figures that can be explored materially.I think of logical structures as figures of thought, figures that can be explored materially".

"Once you realize that the logical connectives form a group of symmetry relations you are almost inevitably led to the idea that these should be reflected in the shapes of the symbols themselves. This is what’s missing in the standard notations."

the article

Less as a competitive advantage

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:02:49 GMT

Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have 4 features, you need 5. Or 15. Or 25. If they’re spending X, you need to spend XX. If they have 20, you need 30.

While this strategy may still work for some, it’s expensive, resource intensive, difficult, defensive, and not very satisfying.

What the writer suggests is a different approach. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. Do less than your competitors to beat them.

We live in a post Holocaust world

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 07:48:22 GMT

Psychoanalysis After Auschwitz?: The "Deported Knowledge" of Anne-Lise Stern

Review of Anne-Lise Stern, Le Savoir deporte: camps, histoire, psychanalyse, edited by Nadine Fresco and Martine Leibovici (Paris: Seuil, Librairie du XXIe siecle, 2004)

Michael Dorland

The Holocaust happened. Historian Istvan Deak, for instance, claimed in 1989 that the Holocaust has been probably the most studied event in history. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, for another, stated "the problem of the historical, technical, bureaucratic and legal circumstances in which the extermination of the Jews took place has been sufficiently clarified" (11). Remarks such as these are, among other things, what gives rise to the present book.

Le Savoir deporte represents the struggle in article form to resoundingly argue the contrary that Parisian psychoanalyst and former Auschwitz and Buchenwald deportee Anne-Lise Stern has waged on the public scene for the past thirty years. Precisely, that the major problem both of contemporary public life and of psychoanalysis is that the Holocaust has not been understood—and thus, remains an omnipresent dimension for understanding what goes on in the Middle East today, the West's complex relations to the Islamic world, and the on-going "wars on terrorism"— to mention only the more visible symptoms that deeply affect public and private lives, now some three generations after the fact.

the key question is less how such a catastrophe could have taken place in "Western civilization," but rather the more difficult issue of how to come to terms with the fact that, nonetheless, it did happen—how to assess its sheer facticity without recourse to the denial which has arguably been the most widely practiced response to the event. Denial aside, the fact the Holocaust happened precipitated a new level of toleration for what would be termed "genocide." Within a mere six months of the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps, the only two atomic bombs ever used on human beings were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The acceptable scale of the violent destruction of peoples has spiraled upwards ever since, showing few signs of abating—just pick the genocide of your choice from the available menu.

to the Full review

MORE on DREAMS

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:19:06 GMT

I was talking a little about DREAMS, but was quating (as usualy) this amazing person's soul talks, and today, found more blowing things by him:

"Current estimated human population on Earth: 6.52 billion people
Taking a rough guess that around 50% of the world's population is asleep or unconscious at any one moment this means that:

Since you started reading this post roughly 2067 human years have been consciously perceived on Earth (half the world perceiving 20 seconds of time each).

In the last decade of your life 32 billion human years have been consciously perceived on Earth (10 years perceived constantly by at least half the world's population at a time).

The Universe as an exponentially self-realising reflexive-consciousness machine? Could be. And let's not begin to ponder about the other forms of consciousness on Earth or elsewhere. Dreamers, animals, Artificial Intelligence systems, memory, flash-back, deja-vu, aliens......"

For more mind-blowing scales on reality check out the Interactive Secret-Worlds animation here

and more...

Why We Play Games

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 07:12:26 GMT

Why We Play Games: 4 Keys to More Emotion shares what we’ve learned from our independent cross-genre research on gamers.

download the White Paper Abstract here

4 Main Reasons People Play Games
1. Hard Fun
2. Easy Fun
3. Altered States
4. The People Factor

Why We Play Games: Gaming Beyond Games

Life as Game

Life is a game where men and women are merely players. Just as film and television eclipsed the stage and literature as the dominant mediums of expression in the 20th century, computer games are emerging as the new ambassador of culture and taste for the 21st. As over 50% of US households play some form of computer games, next generation products and services will look increasingly to games for ways to connect with new consumers, how to become more emotionally and mentally engaging, and to seize the opportunity to offer emotions and challenges for optimal human experiences. Future products and services, work, and other cultural artifacts will provide better customer experiences by carefully crafting a consumer's cognitive and emotional responses.

People will play more games in more places. Mobile gaming will improve other experiences such as interacting with friends and waiting in line. Augmented reality games break out into the real world through Geo-casching or games of tag through a city. With ubiquitous computing soon everything from your mobile phone, to your front door to the ketchup bottle in a diner could contain enough smarts to offer services. Will everything from your car, elevator, to coffeepot contains a screen and therefore the potential to host a game? Will we surf the net from our salt shaker or will it provide other opportunities to delight us and engage our attention?

Today everyone may not play computer games, but as game designers create increasingly compelling and expressive games their influence on other media and culture will be profound. Plus the generation raised on games (today's college students all played Oregon Trail in grade school) will play more games as adults than their parents did.

Designers aim for engagement in addition to making something better/faster/cheaper, and easier to use or market. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of computer games with its fierce competition for a world market valued at over $10 Billion dollars a year (surpassing Hollywood's domestic US box office receipts). And this is just the beginning. To make truly mass-market games designers are racing to innovate beyond graphical realism and high scores to create deeper player experiences. Understanding how games create emotions can make products and services more engaging. For example remove all challenge from a task or job and it becomes boring.

Games will re-design how we work and shop. Employers will use games to screen potential hires for 3D reasoning skills and train them to solve problems with multiple variables. Games will change consumer processes such as the game of buying and selling on eBay.

We see the increasing importance of emotions in design already in products such as the playful squid shape of the Phillip Stark juicer, Danger's Sidekick mobile phone, and so on...

Why We Play Games
we first need to understand what adults like about playing current games. As the first phase of designing new types of gaming experiences we needed to know. So XEODesign conducted a study with 30 hard core and casual players to understand what people like most about playing and how games unlock player emotion. This research is the first step in defining what makes Player Experiences so compelling and offers insight into how we can increase enjoyment of non-game activities and products.

XEODesign's results provide a glimpse as to why people play games, establishing 4 Keys to how games produce emotion through doing. These results also contain insights into how to make other products and services more enjoyable.

http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/05/swissnex_post.html

A democracy of groups

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:04:29 GMT

In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. Now new visual and social technologies are making it possible for people to make decisions and solve complex problems collectively. These technologies are enabling groups not only to create community but also to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. This paper examines the significance of decentralized groups to promote collective action in economic, civic and cultural arenas. Technology in every age creates the conditions and the boundaries for collective action. Cyberspace is no different.

Almost Invisible Art

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:48:33 GMT

What is Almost Invisible Art (AIA)? As usual, it is easiest to approach such a question by defining what it is *not*, what it seeks to avoid, but to start out with a positive approach , I think that the best current definition is:

"AIA is Art made for the sake of its own, without any explanation or excuses. AIA does not seek publicity and is not made for the sake of money. AIA is experiemental in its approach, and seeks to approach complexity in its own terms. AIA is about Action, not Re-Action, the Self of the Artist having Control over the production, working with hirself and others. AIA seeks to play with the idea of Invisibility. AIA is fiercly independent, yet designed for interaction with other performers. AIA is a form of Art available to everyone, working in a no budget/low budget setting just as well as with ample funds."

article

Yves Klein. Le Vide

Creating Your Day With The Quantum Field

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 14:51:19 GMT

The most often referenced interview in the film“What the #$BLEEP*! Do We Know!?” is Dr. Joe Dispensa’s comments on creating his day. The following is the transcript of that part of interview.

"I wake up in the morning, and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen. Now, sometimes, because my mind is examining all the things that I need to get done, it takes me a little bit to settle down, and get to the point, of where I’m actually intentionally creating my day. But here’s the thing."

"When I create my day, and out of nowhere, little things happen that are so unexplainable, I know that they are the process or the result of my creation. And the more I do that, the more I build a neural net, in my brain, that I accept that that’s possible. Gives me the power and the incentive to do it the next day."

"So, if we’re consciously designing our destiny, if we’re consciously, from a spiritual standpoint, throwing in what the idea that our thoughts can affect our reality or affect our life, because reality equals life. Then, I have this little pact that I have when I create my day."

"I say, I’m taking this time to create my day, and I’m infecting the Quantum Field. Now, if it is in fact, the observer’s watching me the whole time that I’m doing this, and there is a spiritual aspect to myself. Then, show me a sign today, that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won’t expect."

"So, I’m as surprised as the- as the- at my ability to be able to experience these things, and make it so that I have no doubt that its come from you. And so, I live my life, in a sense, all day long, thinking about being a genius, or thinking about being the glory and the power of God, or thinking about being Unconditional Love."

"I’ll use living as a genius, for example. And as I do that, during parts of the day, I’ll have thoughts that are so amazing, that cause a chill in my physical body, that have come from nowhere. But then, I remember that that thought has an associated energy, that’s produced an effect in my physical body."

"Now, that’s a subjective experience, but the truth is is that I don’t think that unless I was creating my day to have unlimited thought, that that thought would come." via quantumbiocommunication

Einstein… and beyond

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 08:29:32 GMT

1 December 2005, starting at 12:00 CET: Cern, Geneva (Switzerland), invites you to a 12-hour live webcast on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity… and beyond. Registration is Free, and the topics are fascinting.

via paperholic

The Future of Mankind

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:26:38 GMT

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's
reason has never learnt to separate them...We hold the future still timidly, but
perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are
we to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest
desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those
desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?"
The World, The Flesh and the Devil; An Enquiry into the Future
of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul by J. D. Bernal (1929)

Bernal (great physicist and developer of X-ray crystallography) saw the future
as a struggle of the rational side of man's nature against three enemies. The first enemy he
called the World, meaning scarcity of material goods, inadequate land, harsh climate, desert,
swamp, and other physical obstacles which condemn the majority of mankind to lives of poverty. The second enemy he called the Flesh, meaning the defects in man's physiology
that expose him to disease, cloud the clarity of his mind, and finally destroy him by senile
deterioration. The third enemy he called the Devil, meaning the irrational forces in man's psychological nature that distort his perceptions and lead him astray with crazy hopes and fears, overriding the feeble voice of reason. Bernal had faith that the rational soul of man
would ultimately prevail over these enemies. But he did not foresee cheap or easy victories. In each of these struggles, he saw hope of defeating the enemy only if
mankind is
prepared to adopt extremely radical measures.

To defeat the World, the greater part of the human species will leave this planet
and go to live in innumerable freely floating colonies scattered through outer space.
To defeat the Flesh, humans will learn to replace failing organs with artificial
substitutes until we become an intimate symbiosis of brain and machine.
To defeat the Devil, we shall first reorganize society along scientific lines, and
later learn to exercise conscious intellectual control over our moods and emotional
drives, intervening directly in the affective functions of our brains with technical means
yet to be discovered.
Bernal did not imagine that these remedies would provide a final solution to the
problems of humanity. He well knew that every change in the human situation will
create new problems and new enemies of the rational soul. He stopped where he
stopped because he could not see any farther. His chapter on “The Flesh” ends with the words: “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”

based and inspired by Bernal vision, the author of this article, Freeman J. Dyson(Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey ), elaborates Berna'sl vision and depict his very futuristic (well explained)vision of the future of mankind. via Impearls