skinny legs, or jitterbug perfume?

Every 3 or 4 years, memory suitably dulled, the great purple divining rod pulls in a particular direction, and i am drawn to the spine of Tom Robbins' skinny legs and all (or its entry in my e-readers index) - the useful thing about time and losing one's memory, all the surprises and wonder remain intact.

old interview on NaomiKleinThe Shock Doctrine

@JohnCusack interviews @NaomiKlein on her book "The Shock Doctrine"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcyb0cDf4aQ& -part1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1u_OTa18Ts& -part2

Technoliberation

It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
with the erasure of the last invidious border
when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
and delineate the arrhythmias of drought
to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna
as rich as a thousand human tongues
and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
ancient beyond mythology's reach

So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
no patent can encompass zero and one
no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
no empire rules the quantum waves
And there must be room for all at the celebration of
understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

From Technoliberation by Muteba Kazadi (Greg Egan)

this is how the novel Distress by Greg Egan opens.. bodes really well :)

Heres another work of technoliberation that bears repeating : the Declaration of Independance of CyberSpace, by the lyricist for the GratefulDead, John Barlow, February 8, 1996

The Shock Doctrine

Alfonso Cuaron's short based on Naomi Klein's latest book, The Shock Doctrine.

FREE CULTURE

FREE CULTURE by Lawrence Lessig: halfway through and I'm thinking its just fucking brilliant!
copyright, ownership, derivative content, universal access, and the impact of new technology on all of these. its an essential debate that simply needs to happen more. Lessig argues for sensible change so simply and clearly that you've got to read Free Culture if you're interested in any of it. (naturally its a free download)

I'll try to write some more, or to summarize fully when I've finished, but i probably wont be able to do any of it justice without simply pasting in large bits of text from the book.

btw, he doesnt just push open-content, he nicely describes how and why copyright itself should be re-negotiated.

Checkout the audio version if you want to listen to it.. like maybe, while doing something else ;)
"Free Culture" as a popup audiobook

a sense of numbers

"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you're missing something.

And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce the rational numbers.

And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.
It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers.

It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with the imaginary ones, square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system.

And that (the complex number system) is the first number system in which it's possible to completely explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice."

from Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

natural selection of universes !

Why is the universe the way it is - why are the fundamental properties of elementary particles and forces just such that complexity can arise? Shift the values of these fundamental properties around just a bit and things dont work out so well.. a universe with even slightly varying properties either doesnt survive very long or ends up very empty with no ability for complexity of any sort to arise.

The answer i've most liked so far is that we just happen to be in one universe (of an infinite set within a theoretical multiverse) that does allow for complexity, and that the other sorts of universes that form without the right properties dont exist for long and wont have anybody within them to ask any of these questions anyway..

but Lee Smolin's "natural selection of universes" idea is simply more beautiful and 'complete'. He starts of with the general postulate that some self organising cosmic scale phenomenon could underly the selection of fundamental quantum
properties, but where it gets really beautiful i think is his suggestion that that phenomenon is evolutionary - that universes have evolved fundamental properties that make their reproduction more likely.

As Martin Rees comments: "He's saying that in some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some complicated way. Smolin speculates - as others, like Alan Guth, have also done - that inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new dimension"

To continue the metaphor he uses - universes as animals, fundamental physical properties as genes, and black-holes as reproduction events.

Read the Whole article here - it is a bit old and (in places) dated, but the underlying idea of natural selection for universes, seems to me -at least tonight- to be very exciting.

One question i do have with the article (and some of the comments) concerns the assumption he uses to conclude that the idea is testable - that any tweaking of fundamental properties should produce less or equal number of blackholes, but NOT more. According to Smolin, this should be the case because universes would have evolved to optimize their properties so as to have the maximum chances for reproduction.

But does our understanding of evolution bear this out? Evolution doesnt necessarily achieve perfection - it doesnt even strive for it - its just a self organizing phenomenon that allows things that can persist to persist. What i mean is that there is no guarantee that our current universes 'gene-set' is necessarily the most optimized..

If i'm right, this means that the testability of his theory is open to question - that if anyone finds a shift in fundamental values that allows for more blackholes, the whole theory is not necessarily proven wrong. Thats more sad than it sounds, because without testability, its just another beautiful idea.

(UPDATE: in the comments to this blog, someone pointed out that Smolin addresses this in his book, 'The Life of the Cosmos')

...
Something else that might be worth considering is the possibility of other 'reproduction events' that werent thought of when he wrote this - like maybe the "Brane collisions" that possibly create universes in some of the newer forms of the superstring/m-theory/membrane theories