It has been over a month now since my last post and I view it as a necessary declaration to the world that I am alive! Yes I have successfully survived. Survived what you may ask? Survived life! Yes, as the denizens of Senior Haus like to put it: "Sport Death -- Only Life Can Kill you!"
So what is this relapse, this break in the regularity of not posting? It is a brief repose I am granting myself for finishing all of my applications to graduate school! For those of you who are curious, I've applied for PhD programs in mathematics at the following fine institutes:
1. Stanford
2. Berkeley
3. University of Chicago
4. Brown
5. Columbia
6. Caltech
7. Cornell
8. UPenn
9. UCSD
10. UCSC
11. UMD
The ordering roughly indicates the perceived "quality" of the PhD programs by faculty both at MIT and just mathematicians more broadly. There are some debatable points, and I have slightly superimposed my preference of where I'd like to go, but this is a partial ordering on the institutes I'd like to attend. Of course the naturally gaping hole in this list is the absence of MIT, Princeton, and Harvard. Well, I decided to save my money, because the odds of me getting into any of the top three are slim to none. MIT doesn't want to hold onto their own undergraduates (unless you happen to walk on water) and there tends to be this prevailing attitude that if you spend your undergraduate career at MIT, you need to clear room and "give someone else a chance." I agree with this philosophy largely, but the prevalence of people from smaller, lesser known colleges and universities at MIT for grad school is testament to the fact that sometimes its better to be the largest fish in a small pond than a marlin in the ocean.
So Kudos! to those of you who busted butt at state school while the rest of your friends were doing case races. I just hope that my hundreds of dollars on application fees and four years of struggling will pay off likewise.
The dream plan is that both my girlfriend and I get accepted to either Stanford or Berkeley AND we both win either a Gates or Churchill to fund a year on the other side of the pond to do Part III. I've had it put to me "What would you do if Cambridge offered you a PhD position?" Well that is a tough one, but if I wasn't accepted to anywhere comparable in the States, I'd be seriously tempted by the 3 year PhD at one of the world's best institutes. Of course another large factor would be where my partner is going... the two-body problem is difficult, but solvable.
Of course there is also something to be said about the broad, foundational coursework required by nearly all American PhDs. To be able to speak intelligibly about most fundamental areas of mathematics and pass quals is an achievement in of itself. Granted, after spending some time at Cambridge, I get the sense that you really do get to know a lot more mathematics as an undergraduate, so perhaps the quals system is not necessary for a British PhD. Some people criticize Cambridge students of becoming too specialized, but honestly I've seen specialization in even more drastic forms at MIT. A good number of the very best math students at MIT, forego doing their GIRs until later in their undergraduate career and instead pursue pure mathematics as instensely as one could imagine. I have met people who have only taken one undergraduate math course, with the rest being of graduate level, and granted I stand in awe of their achievements, I can't help but feel like they are pushing too high too fast by not exploring other ideas in other courses. Yet, these people are becoming more and more "the expected" if you are really intent on becoming a pure mathematician. Publishing, being a Putnam fellow, conducting serious pure mathematical research as an undergraduate, doing your graduate-level coursework as an undergrad... are all becoming the golden stamp of acceptance into the very best graduate math PhD programs in the states. It almost makes one wonder what the purpose of graduate school really is. There isn't really any "schooling" rather it is just 5 years of teaching yourself mathematics and working on a research problem. As idyllic as this sounds, I still want some schooling and although I think I'm building myself up to pursue symplectic geometry as a field of research, I feel like I'm blossoming too late and compared to the sophomore taking algebraic topology, there is little hope in actually contributing to mathematics.
This leads me into my new favorite story of inspiration -- Ed Witten. For those of you who don't know him immediately and faint at the surge of intelligence generated in the Akashic field simply by mentioning his name, Ed Witten is many ways the father and shepard of string theory -- the still reigning contender for potentially unifying theory of everything. Ed Witten is not only the physicist with the highest h-number -- has h publications, each cited h number of times, a supposed quantifier of both productivity and profundity -- of any living physicist (h_Ed=117), but he is also the first physicist to ever win the mathematician's even more prestigious version of the Nobel -- the Fields Medal. Well here is a shocker for you:
Ed Witten was a history major.
That's right, a history major from Brandeis, who wanted to be a political journalist coming out of undergrad, who entered a PhD program in economics at U Wisconsion at Madison and dropped out, is now today's greatest string theorist. He was not some hot-housed mathematical prodigy who spent his every waking moment being fed mathematics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner -- he was a history major. Although Ed Witten's father was a physicist, and probably wasn't totally ignorant of his mathematical abilities, he did do what we all hope to experience -- he soul-searched, he wandered, he let his mental legs cover this wide intellectual world, and felt the same sense of indecision, disorientation and failure that most mortals do and then he found what he was destined to do, siezed it by the very scruff on the back of its neck and did something great, transcended mortality and entered the realm of the Gods -- may we all be so lucky.
The peculiar bit to Ed Witten's story is how a history major, economics-PhD-dropout, got accepted to Princeton's Applied Math program. The sobering note of this story is that replicating Ed Witten's steps nowadays is probably impossible.
I can only hope that my years of soul-searching and experimentation in other departments and realms of learning, and late discovery of the beauty of mathematics will not be punished by the grad admissions committees. Whenever I express my pessimism to friends they ask, "Oh, are your grades not that good?" No, I actually have a perfect GPA in math. "Then what's the problem?" The problem, compadre, is that I did wander and although I have all the necessary ingredients for graduate studies in mathematics, I didn't do loads of graduate level courses as an undergraduate. The attitude among most MIT students is that you do theoretical math because it is hard... not because it is beautiful, but because you want to show off your intellectual machismo and then go off and work in finance or do graduate studies in some other field. There is no point to your studies -- you do it because it is difficult and nothing more. My problem is that I never subscribed to this philosophy. I always did things because I was interested, because I saw purpose, I saw meaning, I saw beauty, that is the only reason I did or will do anything -- beauty.
So I will try to keep everyone up to date on my pursuit of beauty.
Thanks for tuning in.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Joanna Macy
Just a quick break from doing research for my 21W.775 paper:
Joanna Macy is a buddhist with a serious interest in deep ecology and environmentalism. Her doctoral thesis involved a synthesis of general systems theory with Buddhist thinking. The publication Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems looks like an interesting read.
Alright, back to work.
Joanna Macy is a buddhist with a serious interest in deep ecology and environmentalism. Her doctoral thesis involved a synthesis of general systems theory with Buddhist thinking. The publication Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems looks like an interesting read.
Alright, back to work.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Deep Ecology
Hello and welcome again to Justin's endless effort to procrastinate less interesting work in favor of the quest for insight!
My 21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues, is the first humanities class I've taken at MIT that is NOT a philosophy class. Believe me ladies and gentlemen, that I would have never ventured outside the lofty domains of Course 24 - Philosophy and Linguistics, is it hadn't been for the wretched "HASS-D" requirement of MIT, that requires that I explore at least 3 flavors of the same ice cream: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
What have I done to negotiate this forced exposure to other fields? Crafted the class into my own philosophy course of course! So far I've successfully been able to dictate my own philosophical-personal style of writing and have been received warmly. For an upcoming 10-12 page research paper, we've been asked to investigate some environmental issue of something relating to this area. My chosen topic is the Environmental Ethics of Zen Buddhism. Ha! Take that for forcing me to follow an assignment!
In my search for references, I actually came across a very good book by the name of "Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics" by Simon P. James. In my first pass of the book, I ran across this notion of "Deep Ecology" which asserts that our current environmental crisis cannot be solved by the application of more science and technology. Rather it requires a deep shift in western consciousness in how we view our place in nature. Apparently one of the first proponents of this idea was Lynn White a professor in Medieval History who in a 1967 issue of Science, wrote "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis".
In White's essay I've found a interesting analysis of the psychological foundations for our current relationship with the environment. Upon first reading I became convinced that it was one of the direct influences on Daniel Quinn's amazing book Ishmael.
The underlying idea is that the roots of modern science lie inside a Christian world view, which focuses on Man's quest to dominate, understand and subvert nature. The closing of the class gap has put the need and desire for technology in touch with the higher pursuits of pure science. Like gasoline on a fire, we've exploded in capability and population as a result of this, and even though the concerns of over-population and the environment are relatively new ones, we've been sowing the seeds of our destruction for hundreds of years.
As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.
One of the things which struck me about this excerpt is the striking resemblance of "brain and hand" with MIT's slogan "Mens et Manus" -- "Mind and Hand."
Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.
At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
And some people wonder why I'm a pagan.
The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination, orthodoxy--that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.
I was not aware of this divide even within the church. I suppose it goes to show what an evolving, self-selecting entity religion can be. It also points to why it so hard to say matter-of-factly "I am Christian." What breed of Christian? What time and place of Christianity are you referring to? In many ways, I find the gnostic and early Christian ideas incredibly interesting. I might even say I'd believe in some of their ideas, but it seems frightening to me to then say that I am Christian.
But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul's aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific.
Ditto. Then enters the big bad Latin West --
However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.
The hypothesis may now be unnecessary, but the view of conquest and understanding remains.
If so, then modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology.
Professor White, then brings us the bad news:
I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.
I can only hope that he is wrong, and there are some indications that he is wrong. The environmental movement spurred by essays like this one have reached the shores of scientists and politicians and (some of us) are working fast to correct our poor steering of the past few centuries. The human mind has produced some incredible good and I am optimistic enough to think that we will develop some brilliant inventions to reduce our impact on this world and stabilize our place on this little blue marble.
I have no doubt that life on Earth will survive until our solar system suffers from a cold death in a few billion years, it is only a question of whether or not humans will outlast the next few centuries.
What I envision is a scientific-enlightened citizenry that adopts some of the more buddhist and animist ways of thinking, in an effort to live in harmony with other life on Earth. By wedding mind and hand, we did more than we knew better to do, but our consciousness is catching up with our capabilities and I can only hope that a wedding of mind and spirit will be able right the wrongs of the past.
My 21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues, is the first humanities class I've taken at MIT that is NOT a philosophy class. Believe me ladies and gentlemen, that I would have never ventured outside the lofty domains of Course 24 - Philosophy and Linguistics, is it hadn't been for the wretched "HASS-D" requirement of MIT, that requires that I explore at least 3 flavors of the same ice cream: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
What have I done to negotiate this forced exposure to other fields? Crafted the class into my own philosophy course of course! So far I've successfully been able to dictate my own philosophical-personal style of writing and have been received warmly. For an upcoming 10-12 page research paper, we've been asked to investigate some environmental issue of something relating to this area. My chosen topic is the Environmental Ethics of Zen Buddhism. Ha! Take that for forcing me to follow an assignment!
In my search for references, I actually came across a very good book by the name of "Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics" by Simon P. James. In my first pass of the book, I ran across this notion of "Deep Ecology" which asserts that our current environmental crisis cannot be solved by the application of more science and technology. Rather it requires a deep shift in western consciousness in how we view our place in nature. Apparently one of the first proponents of this idea was Lynn White a professor in Medieval History who in a 1967 issue of Science, wrote "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis".
In White's essay I've found a interesting analysis of the psychological foundations for our current relationship with the environment. Upon first reading I became convinced that it was one of the direct influences on Daniel Quinn's amazing book Ishmael.
The underlying idea is that the roots of modern science lie inside a Christian world view, which focuses on Man's quest to dominate, understand and subvert nature. The closing of the class gap has put the need and desire for technology in touch with the higher pursuits of pure science. Like gasoline on a fire, we've exploded in capability and population as a result of this, and even though the concerns of over-population and the environment are relatively new ones, we've been sowing the seeds of our destruction for hundreds of years.
As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.
One of the things which struck me about this excerpt is the striking resemblance of "brain and hand" with MIT's slogan "Mens et Manus" -- "Mind and Hand."
Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.
At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
And some people wonder why I'm a pagan.
The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination, orthodoxy--that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.
I was not aware of this divide even within the church. I suppose it goes to show what an evolving, self-selecting entity religion can be. It also points to why it so hard to say matter-of-factly "I am Christian." What breed of Christian? What time and place of Christianity are you referring to? In many ways, I find the gnostic and early Christian ideas incredibly interesting. I might even say I'd believe in some of their ideas, but it seems frightening to me to then say that I am Christian.
But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul's aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific.
Ditto. Then enters the big bad Latin West --
However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.
The hypothesis may now be unnecessary, but the view of conquest and understanding remains.
If so, then modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology.
Professor White, then brings us the bad news:
I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.
I can only hope that he is wrong, and there are some indications that he is wrong. The environmental movement spurred by essays like this one have reached the shores of scientists and politicians and (some of us) are working fast to correct our poor steering of the past few centuries. The human mind has produced some incredible good and I am optimistic enough to think that we will develop some brilliant inventions to reduce our impact on this world and stabilize our place on this little blue marble.
I have no doubt that life on Earth will survive until our solar system suffers from a cold death in a few billion years, it is only a question of whether or not humans will outlast the next few centuries.
What I envision is a scientific-enlightened citizenry that adopts some of the more buddhist and animist ways of thinking, in an effort to live in harmony with other life on Earth. By wedding mind and hand, we did more than we knew better to do, but our consciousness is catching up with our capabilities and I can only hope that a wedding of mind and spirit will be able right the wrongs of the past.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
R&R After a Week of Hell
I have to confess it. This past week was one of the most grueling, exhausting, and all around depressing weeks I've ever experienced as an undergraduate. One of those weeks where you say to yourself before hand, this is going to be one of the most preposterous weeks you'll ever experience and somehow when you're actually in the middle of it, you forget those words of caution that you gave yourself. There were times when I felt like my hopes and ambitions to become a mathematician were crumbling down around me and that I was going to have to give it all up and figure out something else to do. When the going was at its toughest, perspective was just something I couldn't have.
I'm recovering from that slump, and most of it can be attributed to having a 4-day weekend and spending my first day in a long time where I did absolutely NO work. A truly amazing feeling, I almost forgot what it was like. So what did I do with my day of rest and relaxation you might ask? I took pictures of course!
The MIT Museum has recently had a "Grand Re-Opening" and introduced several new exhibits including several technical toys from the personal collection of Claude Shannon, information theorist extraordinaire.
The kinematic sculptures of Arthur Ganson was a usual treat. The photo above is of a rather haunting piece named "Alone" where the complex gear network below causes the figurine to slowly move away (or towards) the edge.
The arm above, known as "Minsky Arm," was the second arm developed by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert in a several year project to develop a computer which could see and interact with objects independent of human control. The amount of humanity which was instilled in its craftsmanship, is truly amazing. The relaxed state of the arm feels graceful and beautiful to me, as if I were admiring some fresco in the Vatican.
The self-oiling sculpture is one of my favorites of Ganson's. This machine is able to maintain itself, feed itself oil, it features of the complex self-referential process of homeostasis that distinguishes living things from the normally robotic.
This push cart seems to be an incredible satire on the constant rush and desire to get ahead and today's materialistic capitalist world. It is built like a heavy-duty baby carriage (or "pram" for you British) that writes out a message on a piece of paper as you push it. On closer inspection (below) the message is the instruction "faster!" This is just another example of the sort of recursive self-creating art that I've grown to appreciate.
Upon disembarking from the MIT Museum, I felt my photo-taking hunger was not satisfied. I then remembered this crazy house on Brookline that I've been meaning to document for several months now.
The house is this wonderfully strange purple reminder of "cosmic consciousness" and the sort of playful insight gained and distributed by the "Beautiful People" of the 60s and 70s. This island in Cambridge remains. The slideshow above will give you a feel for the house, but I was very careful to document the whole fence and have uploaded the original size. Feel free to zoom in on the photos in my picasaweb and examine the detailed sayings on the fence. Please be patient as each photo is nearly 5mb in size, but the tapestry of this fence's wisdom is worth the wait. Some of my favorite nuggets are: "Serious Governments always fail", "The Cosmic Goose", "use of paraphenomenal abilities is a normal capacity among all advanced Galactic Civilizations, but Hyperspace is the frosting on the cake", "Twosday is Primeval, the egg is weavel", "competition Vs. Producing things which are cosmically beautiful", "generally speaking disorderly terrain reflects the truest Reality", the list just goes on. But what is this house? I don't know. It claims to be the "Center for Intergalactic Fragmentational Revurberations", but when I told my parents that I was applying there for graduate school they seemed suspicious. Perhaps the "National Defense Center Against Leaders: you're in charge" would be more pleasing to their palate, I think not.
Leaving the house of "Cosmic Structure" behind, I had to refuel. So coffee and pastries were in order. This gorgeous middle eastern restaurant and hooka bar, certainly filled the bill.
I did a random walk through west Cambridge before ending up in Harvard Square, where the alcohol-free, Puritanical verson of Oktoberfest was being held. Aside from my encounter with a giant bunny rabbit in a suit, the event was pretty tame.
Perhaps it was the non-alcoholic beer I had, or some suspect sausage, everything started to take on funny colors, so I decided to head home. Fortunately, heading home, my camera agreed with my altered state. At least it made for beautiful pictures. I hope you enjoy my subjective take on reality!
I'm recovering from that slump, and most of it can be attributed to having a 4-day weekend and spending my first day in a long time where I did absolutely NO work. A truly amazing feeling, I almost forgot what it was like. So what did I do with my day of rest and relaxation you might ask? I took pictures of course!
The MIT Museum has recently had a "Grand Re-Opening" and introduced several new exhibits including several technical toys from the personal collection of Claude Shannon, information theorist extraordinaire.
The kinematic sculptures of Arthur Ganson was a usual treat. The photo above is of a rather haunting piece named "Alone" where the complex gear network below causes the figurine to slowly move away (or towards) the edge.
The arm above, known as "Minsky Arm," was the second arm developed by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert in a several year project to develop a computer which could see and interact with objects independent of human control. The amount of humanity which was instilled in its craftsmanship, is truly amazing. The relaxed state of the arm feels graceful and beautiful to me, as if I were admiring some fresco in the Vatican.
The self-oiling sculpture is one of my favorites of Ganson's. This machine is able to maintain itself, feed itself oil, it features of the complex self-referential process of homeostasis that distinguishes living things from the normally robotic.
This push cart seems to be an incredible satire on the constant rush and desire to get ahead and today's materialistic capitalist world. It is built like a heavy-duty baby carriage (or "pram" for you British) that writes out a message on a piece of paper as you push it. On closer inspection (below) the message is the instruction "faster!" This is just another example of the sort of recursive self-creating art that I've grown to appreciate.
Upon disembarking from the MIT Museum, I felt my photo-taking hunger was not satisfied. I then remembered this crazy house on Brookline that I've been meaning to document for several months now.
The house is this wonderfully strange purple reminder of "cosmic consciousness" and the sort of playful insight gained and distributed by the "Beautiful People" of the 60s and 70s. This island in Cambridge remains. The slideshow above will give you a feel for the house, but I was very careful to document the whole fence and have uploaded the original size. Feel free to zoom in on the photos in my picasaweb and examine the detailed sayings on the fence. Please be patient as each photo is nearly 5mb in size, but the tapestry of this fence's wisdom is worth the wait. Some of my favorite nuggets are: "Serious Governments always fail", "The Cosmic Goose", "use of paraphenomenal abilities is a normal capacity among all advanced Galactic Civilizations, but Hyperspace is the frosting on the cake", "Twosday is Primeval, the egg is weavel", "competition Vs. Producing things which are cosmically beautiful", "generally speaking disorderly terrain reflects the truest Reality", the list just goes on. But what is this house? I don't know. It claims to be the "Center for Intergalactic Fragmentational Revurberations", but when I told my parents that I was applying there for graduate school they seemed suspicious. Perhaps the "National Defense Center Against Leaders: you're in charge" would be more pleasing to their palate, I think not.
Leaving the house of "Cosmic Structure" behind, I had to refuel. So coffee and pastries were in order. This gorgeous middle eastern restaurant and hooka bar, certainly filled the bill.
I did a random walk through west Cambridge before ending up in Harvard Square, where the alcohol-free, Puritanical verson of Oktoberfest was being held. Aside from my encounter with a giant bunny rabbit in a suit, the event was pretty tame.
Perhaps it was the non-alcoholic beer I had, or some suspect sausage, everything started to take on funny colors, so I decided to head home. Fortunately, heading home, my camera agreed with my altered state. At least it made for beautiful pictures. I hope you enjoy my subjective take on reality!
Monday, September 24, 2007
A (Photographic) Day in the Life
The Day is gone and I have a tale to tell, of a three day weekend from a week of hell!
Like any good morning it started with seeing Sasha through fresh eyes as we both woke up early to jump start the day.
Of course there is no better way to kick start one's day than with a nice big breakfast at Sunny's Diner.
Once I had ate my fair share of delicious dark rye toast, over hard eggs with hot sauce and sausage, I made my way to my task for the day: Psychology lab studies. Yes my friend, I was selling myself for 6.5 hours that day for $100 and pizza so that the people at the big blue building in the sky could pick my brain and collect their data. I really should have been working, but $100 and free pizza was hard to dismiss.
I was running late for the "prompt 10am start" of the study, but I had to pause and enjoy the sight of the Stata and its crumpled colorful glory.
Oh Stata! What will your slanted confusion deliver us?! What genius lurks in your fantastic folds?!
Alas! My moment of genuflection had gone on too long. I entered the mouth of Stata's baby brother across the way: Building 46.
Once inside the monster's mouth, I was grabbed by men in white coats and subjected to horrors untellable to any decent person. Transcribing minute sound clips into their phonetic spellings for nearly 5 hours is enough for any man to lose his mind, but I am an MIT student! And with my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Powers I foiled my assailants and took pleasure in the painstaking detail of my task! Take that you formidable foes of psychoacoustics! Now where's my $100?
"That'll be sent to you in the next 4 to 6 weeks."
Damn you bureaucracy and your molasses-like speed and methods! I'll get you one day!
Finally released from my captors with a few extra pieces attached and some other ones missing, I paused to contemplate Frank Gehry's own obvious product of hallucination and I began to wonder what Ken Kesey government funded psychiatric hospital he frequented to pay his way through grad school.
But wait! Before I bade goodbye to the building in the sky I had to document my surroundings. They say this atrium was designed to promote interaction of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. As you can see, it was very popular on this Sunday afternoon.
Approaching the windows to the left, I gazed out over the train tracks that split the building in two. Everyone thought it was such a clever idea to build over the train tracks. That's right! Don't box me in! I'll build whatever I want, wherever I want! Now I hear that the rumbling of the passing trains is trashing the results of the very delicate MRI equipment located in some of the labs here. Oh well...
Good bye great atrium! I wish you Godspeed in your facilitation of interaction in the Revolution of Brain and Cognitive Science sure to come!
On my way out I caught a glance of the main sign warning off invaders. I thought the piece of art to the right was telling: "Welcome to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, If you have loose wires in your head, you've found the right place!"
The study's effects were wearing on me. I had to make a quick duck through MIT to find coffee. Time was running out! I needed caffeine!!!!
Damn it! Something interesting was on a light post as I attempted to rush by in the pursuit of that dark liqueur of life. Chromosome Two?!?! Ahhh... The Genome Trail! Like its own Oregon Trail, there is gold in these rivers of biotechnology waiting to be panned. Let's all rush to the frontier!
After locating an Au Bon Pain and injecting iced coffee directly into my veins, I sat in the afterglow of the moment, admiring the sunny dance of colors in Cambridge's Kendall Square.
Now that I was rejuvenated I could explore! Wandering towards Boston-side, I happened upon an old friend of mine named "Galaxy". Ah, the wonderful conversations I've had by this fountain! Thank you fountain, but I must be on my way!
I began to cross Longfellow bridge in eager anticipation of the wonderful sights in the middle of its mighty span. Rusted green decor of European persuasion, guide me to your center!
The sights are too beautiful and too numerous. I must take pictures! Boats! Water! Boston! How I love thee!
I kept snapping photo upon photo. Aha! Take that world, as I steal your beauty with my lens! I continued to rush to the center of the bridge and finally framed what was to be the photo of the day. "Change Battery Pack" greeted me on the large LCD and I started to cry. Damn you Lithium Ion batteries! If only I had brought my battery grip! Sigh...
I quickly counseled myself, because I knew I had friends waiting for me at home (and new batteries). Hello Emerson dear! Good Evening, Hatcher Honey! Did the toilet paper keep you warm while I was gone? Hatcher, did you drink the rest of my coke?!?
The sun was setting and I decided that my camera could capture drapery better than I could draw.
Oh glorious, industrial Cambridge! Your sunsets mock the apocalyptic skies of Hiroshima!
If only your crime rate weren't so high and your construction so loud...
My day was done and bed awaited my tired body and probed mind. But before I embarked on that evening's study of oneirology (the study of dreams), I had to prepare for my night with a little bedtime story. I began to read immediately "Once upon a time there was a CW complex that...", but my eyes became heavy and there was no more story to tell of the three day weekend from a week of hell.
Like any good morning it started with seeing Sasha through fresh eyes as we both woke up early to jump start the day.
Of course there is no better way to kick start one's day than with a nice big breakfast at Sunny's Diner.
Once I had ate my fair share of delicious dark rye toast, over hard eggs with hot sauce and sausage, I made my way to my task for the day: Psychology lab studies. Yes my friend, I was selling myself for 6.5 hours that day for $100 and pizza so that the people at the big blue building in the sky could pick my brain and collect their data. I really should have been working, but $100 and free pizza was hard to dismiss.
I was running late for the "prompt 10am start" of the study, but I had to pause and enjoy the sight of the Stata and its crumpled colorful glory.
Oh Stata! What will your slanted confusion deliver us?! What genius lurks in your fantastic folds?!
Alas! My moment of genuflection had gone on too long. I entered the mouth of Stata's baby brother across the way: Building 46.
Once inside the monster's mouth, I was grabbed by men in white coats and subjected to horrors untellable to any decent person. Transcribing minute sound clips into their phonetic spellings for nearly 5 hours is enough for any man to lose his mind, but I am an MIT student! And with my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Powers I foiled my assailants and took pleasure in the painstaking detail of my task! Take that you formidable foes of psychoacoustics! Now where's my $100?
"That'll be sent to you in the next 4 to 6 weeks."
Damn you bureaucracy and your molasses-like speed and methods! I'll get you one day!
Finally released from my captors with a few extra pieces attached and some other ones missing, I paused to contemplate Frank Gehry's own obvious product of hallucination and I began to wonder what Ken Kesey government funded psychiatric hospital he frequented to pay his way through grad school.
But wait! Before I bade goodbye to the building in the sky I had to document my surroundings. They say this atrium was designed to promote interaction of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. As you can see, it was very popular on this Sunday afternoon.
Approaching the windows to the left, I gazed out over the train tracks that split the building in two. Everyone thought it was such a clever idea to build over the train tracks. That's right! Don't box me in! I'll build whatever I want, wherever I want! Now I hear that the rumbling of the passing trains is trashing the results of the very delicate MRI equipment located in some of the labs here. Oh well...
Good bye great atrium! I wish you Godspeed in your facilitation of interaction in the Revolution of Brain and Cognitive Science sure to come!
On my way out I caught a glance of the main sign warning off invaders. I thought the piece of art to the right was telling: "Welcome to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, If you have loose wires in your head, you've found the right place!"
The study's effects were wearing on me. I had to make a quick duck through MIT to find coffee. Time was running out! I needed caffeine!!!!
Damn it! Something interesting was on a light post as I attempted to rush by in the pursuit of that dark liqueur of life. Chromosome Two?!?! Ahhh... The Genome Trail! Like its own Oregon Trail, there is gold in these rivers of biotechnology waiting to be panned. Let's all rush to the frontier!
After locating an Au Bon Pain and injecting iced coffee directly into my veins, I sat in the afterglow of the moment, admiring the sunny dance of colors in Cambridge's Kendall Square.
Now that I was rejuvenated I could explore! Wandering towards Boston-side, I happened upon an old friend of mine named "Galaxy". Ah, the wonderful conversations I've had by this fountain! Thank you fountain, but I must be on my way!
I began to cross Longfellow bridge in eager anticipation of the wonderful sights in the middle of its mighty span. Rusted green decor of European persuasion, guide me to your center!
The sights are too beautiful and too numerous. I must take pictures! Boats! Water! Boston! How I love thee!
I kept snapping photo upon photo. Aha! Take that world, as I steal your beauty with my lens! I continued to rush to the center of the bridge and finally framed what was to be the photo of the day. "Change Battery Pack" greeted me on the large LCD and I started to cry. Damn you Lithium Ion batteries! If only I had brought my battery grip! Sigh...
I quickly counseled myself, because I knew I had friends waiting for me at home (and new batteries). Hello Emerson dear! Good Evening, Hatcher Honey! Did the toilet paper keep you warm while I was gone? Hatcher, did you drink the rest of my coke?!?
The sun was setting and I decided that my camera could capture drapery better than I could draw.
Oh glorious, industrial Cambridge! Your sunsets mock the apocalyptic skies of Hiroshima!
If only your crime rate weren't so high and your construction so loud...
My day was done and bed awaited my tired body and probed mind. But before I embarked on that evening's study of oneirology (the study of dreams), I had to prepare for my night with a little bedtime story. I began to read immediately "Once upon a time there was a CW complex that...", but my eyes became heavy and there was no more story to tell of the three day weekend from a week of hell.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
First Day Rebel
My Digital SLR the Canon Rebel XTi came finally! I really feel like the power in my hands outstretches my capability. But I look forward to learning! Check out my first day highlights. They are largely full auto, but I look forward to playing with the full features very soon!
Emerson and the American Transcedentalist
As part of my coursework in 21W.775 (Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues), we've started reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's first serious work "Nature." Upon reading the first half, I'm completely blown away at the ideas that Emerson was turned onto way back in 1836. I quote:
"Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena" (P. 3)
ALL PHENOMENA?!?!?!?
So maybe he's reaching a little bit there, and really can't hope for such lofty goals. Does Emerson tuck his tail between his legs and step down a few layers of transcendental abstraction? Hardly...
"Standing on the bare ground -- my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." (p. 6)
I became a transparent eyeball... At this point of reading the essay, I was expecting Allen Ginsburg and Ram Dass to come skipping over the hillsides to join Emerson, chanting "Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare..." while The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane are helping Thoreau outfit his cabin with the latest and greatest stroboscopic lights and audio feedback effects.
But seriously, Emerson seems totally turned onto a whole way of thinking, that seems culturally disconnected from him. At times his musings seem almost painfully and obviously Buddhist in nature.
"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?" (p. 14)
The answer, Emerson buddy pal, is pretty much the majority of Western Civilization isn't reminded of the impermanence of all things. At times when reading Emerson, I find it hard to believe that this is a guy in Massachusetts and not some ambitious American monk taking up sanctuary in a Tibetan monastery.
The number of jewels of insight that Emerson packs into this sub 40 page essay truly is remarkable. I leave you with these few morsels, because otherwise I'd be quoting verbatim the entire work. The number of ideas that Emerson and his Transcendental Club seem tuned into a full 130 years before the counter-culture movement of the 1960s is suggestive that there is a rich tradition to be explored here. That sense of longing that so many of us Western spiritual children of the East have by being misplaced physically in this wide world is quelled when we find a great grandfather of American literature spiritually and physically close to home.
"Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena" (P. 3)
ALL PHENOMENA?!?!?!?
So maybe he's reaching a little bit there, and really can't hope for such lofty goals. Does Emerson tuck his tail between his legs and step down a few layers of transcendental abstraction? Hardly...
"Standing on the bare ground -- my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." (p. 6)
I became a transparent eyeball... At this point of reading the essay, I was expecting Allen Ginsburg and Ram Dass to come skipping over the hillsides to join Emerson, chanting "Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare..." while The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane are helping Thoreau outfit his cabin with the latest and greatest stroboscopic lights and audio feedback effects.
But seriously, Emerson seems totally turned onto a whole way of thinking, that seems culturally disconnected from him. At times his musings seem almost painfully and obviously Buddhist in nature.
"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?" (p. 14)
The answer, Emerson buddy pal, is pretty much the majority of Western Civilization isn't reminded of the impermanence of all things. At times when reading Emerson, I find it hard to believe that this is a guy in Massachusetts and not some ambitious American monk taking up sanctuary in a Tibetan monastery.
The number of jewels of insight that Emerson packs into this sub 40 page essay truly is remarkable. I leave you with these few morsels, because otherwise I'd be quoting verbatim the entire work. The number of ideas that Emerson and his Transcendental Club seem tuned into a full 130 years before the counter-culture movement of the 1960s is suggestive that there is a rich tradition to be explored here. That sense of longing that so many of us Western spiritual children of the East have by being misplaced physically in this wide world is quelled when we find a great grandfather of American literature spiritually and physically close to home.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Royksopp - "Remind Me"
So this music video has infected my brain.
Sometimes I really hate being the victim of internet memes, but then again our internet has enabled small jewels of high quality to become easily identified and popularized. It makes me wonder how this has impacted business and the ability for the "little guy" just to speak out.
The advent and use of the internet has also enabled things like this blog to actually come to life. I had thought several years ago that it would be nice for there to just be an open online forum for discussion for my family and friends to post on and read each other's thoughts. This could offer glimpses into each of our own personal worlds and thus we can get to know each other in ways that normally wouldn't have been possible. Normal interaction has its pluses: Visual eye contact, body language, tone, mood, etc. Whole worlds of emotions are hidden in the text-based communication of the online world, and often this leads to misunderstanding, i.e. flamewars. However, that degree of impersonality and chance to actually just write for whoever wants to read, in many ways allows your loved ones to observe you externally.
I'd like to dub this the "Relationship-Schrodinger's-Cat-in-a-box" paradox. When we interact with people in a face-to-face manner, we learn to exaggerate certain aspects of our selves and suppress others. We cultivate separate images of ourselves for separate friends and groups of friends. Pretty much everyone does this. When guys are out to a pub with just the guys we can almost become more crude then we'd like to think of ourselves normally. Machismo and all those little bits of our person-hood come rushing to the surface. In new social situations, some of us dry up waiting for someone else to crack the ice, or some of us become the group jester, to help break the awkward silence. The bottom line is that we have these constants, these eigenstates of personality that certain people always observe us in.
The fascination that I have with my blogging experience is that there is this rare opportunity for different people to tune in and look inside this box of personality you've created. Weird things happen. Your parents can see you in a superposition of personalities which are both known and unknown. Certain friends can observe you talking about things which you may have never normally discussed with them. In some ways this may create stress, stress to keep your personal eigenstates separate for separate people, but I welcome the superposition. May it be insightful for everyone!
Sometimes I really hate being the victim of internet memes, but then again our internet has enabled small jewels of high quality to become easily identified and popularized. It makes me wonder how this has impacted business and the ability for the "little guy" just to speak out.
The advent and use of the internet has also enabled things like this blog to actually come to life. I had thought several years ago that it would be nice for there to just be an open online forum for discussion for my family and friends to post on and read each other's thoughts. This could offer glimpses into each of our own personal worlds and thus we can get to know each other in ways that normally wouldn't have been possible. Normal interaction has its pluses: Visual eye contact, body language, tone, mood, etc. Whole worlds of emotions are hidden in the text-based communication of the online world, and often this leads to misunderstanding, i.e. flamewars. However, that degree of impersonality and chance to actually just write for whoever wants to read, in many ways allows your loved ones to observe you externally.
I'd like to dub this the "Relationship-Schrodinger's-Cat-in-a-box" paradox. When we interact with people in a face-to-face manner, we learn to exaggerate certain aspects of our selves and suppress others. We cultivate separate images of ourselves for separate friends and groups of friends. Pretty much everyone does this. When guys are out to a pub with just the guys we can almost become more crude then we'd like to think of ourselves normally. Machismo and all those little bits of our person-hood come rushing to the surface. In new social situations, some of us dry up waiting for someone else to crack the ice, or some of us become the group jester, to help break the awkward silence. The bottom line is that we have these constants, these eigenstates of personality that certain people always observe us in.
The fascination that I have with my blogging experience is that there is this rare opportunity for different people to tune in and look inside this box of personality you've created. Weird things happen. Your parents can see you in a superposition of personalities which are both known and unknown. Certain friends can observe you talking about things which you may have never normally discussed with them. In some ways this may create stress, stress to keep your personal eigenstates separate for separate people, but I welcome the superposition. May it be insightful for everyone!
Friday, September 14, 2007
Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction
After the long awaited reunion with my good friend Matt, I was truly amazed to hear the changes in thinking and creative ideas he's explored in the last year.
The one idea which I want to highlight is how space affects people's interactions and their political, economic, and social tendencies. The main thrust of the argument is that in large city design where there is a high degree of connectivity and interaction between people, the favored way of political thinking is liberal not by self-selection and income bracket, but rather interaction with people makes liberal people. Suburbs and sections of sprawl, where everyone has to drive everywhere, and little or no interaction with other people actually occurs, tends to promote conservative thinking.
The thrust of Matt's argument comes from using Orange County as a case study of intentional urban planning of conservatism. As you may or may not know (wiki it), Orange County is a very conservative section of California that routinely votes Republican. Apparently in the 60s or 70s, there was a pushing front of liberal culture in all the areas surrounding Orange County. In an effort to rebuff their influence, city planners actually designed large sections of Orange County to have classic suburban sprawl as a design, where interconnectivity and the chance for encountering other people is intentionally low. In doing so, the structure of the space of Orange County has created a safe haven and virtual breeding ground for conservative thinking. Although I haven't found specific evidence for this claim, I've heard it said that actual minutes of the meetings of the city planners captures this intention to design cities to be conservative.
This idea I find completely striking. It is not the case of classism, where the rich are more conservative and thus live in large suburban mansions with their personal golf course in the back yard, but rather that well-off people are being conditioned into conservative ideals by their lack of interaction with people. This idea makes sense, as there are tons of wealthy people living in cities (Who else can live in those million dollar brownstones in Boston?) but they happen to be more liberal in tendency.
The Congress for the New Urbanism documents these ideas much better then I'm doing here. Their Charter, makes some interesting points and does a better job of fleshing out the complexity of the issues involved. In addition to the political tendencies that cities engender, by optimizing already developed areas, we can reduce our impact on the environment. This has been already realized by many European cities in the form of Green Belt Policies. I was amazed at how Europe has 10 times the population density of the US and yet there is so much green area. I spread these memes in passing, and turn again to some of my own thoughts.
Matt and I have been considering how this "space affecting interaction affecting people" idea is manifest on even the smaller level of living communities at MIT. In particular it seems striking to me that the reason why East Campus is particularly liberal is not because some how a large group of liberal, progressive, hippy MIT undergrads managed to get lotteried into the dorm and the culture just snowballed, but rather the actual architecture of the dorm has created such an environment. In particular the long connected hallways provides immediate line-of-sight to anyone who might else be out in the hall hanging out. Seeing people milling outside their room provides a nucleation site for interaction and suddenly people are talking and socializing and sharing ideas and expanding each other's minds. This is to be contrasted with Simmons, which has each long floor divided arbitrarily into towers so that in order to get from point A to point B, one has to really do some work in navigating different floors quickly so that one can get inside one's room and hunker down for the night. The only chance for interaction is maybe the elevators, which is often stifling, awkward, non-committal and brief. In fact it is interesting how each of the major MIT dormitories has an architecture which is conducive to the type of people which live there. Granted there is a process of selection on the part of the student, but for formation of these cultures they really are governed by the structure of the space.
This brings me nicely to one of my favorite living groups to visit, tEp. As Matt correctly points out the structure of the spaces for interaction in tEp really are conducive to certain activities and sometimes the disorientation caused by the frequent, bizarre happenings, is just what is needed to stretching ones consciousness and tolerance.
The effect now seems pretty self-evident. Interaction with people on a frequent basis, implies a wider exposure to opinion, culture, beliefs, and backgrounds. The necessity of sharing a common space and living area encourages tolerance in all of these dimensions. Tolerance often is the seed to open-thinking about various subjects and policies and consequently, dis-attachment from dogma, conservative values and general narrow thinking.
Of course an already existent inclination towards liberal thinking, has also promoted the growth of communes, but it is interesting to see the causality go the other way.
The one idea which I want to highlight is how space affects people's interactions and their political, economic, and social tendencies. The main thrust of the argument is that in large city design where there is a high degree of connectivity and interaction between people, the favored way of political thinking is liberal not by self-selection and income bracket, but rather interaction with people makes liberal people. Suburbs and sections of sprawl, where everyone has to drive everywhere, and little or no interaction with other people actually occurs, tends to promote conservative thinking.
The thrust of Matt's argument comes from using Orange County as a case study of intentional urban planning of conservatism. As you may or may not know (wiki it), Orange County is a very conservative section of California that routinely votes Republican. Apparently in the 60s or 70s, there was a pushing front of liberal culture in all the areas surrounding Orange County. In an effort to rebuff their influence, city planners actually designed large sections of Orange County to have classic suburban sprawl as a design, where interconnectivity and the chance for encountering other people is intentionally low. In doing so, the structure of the space of Orange County has created a safe haven and virtual breeding ground for conservative thinking. Although I haven't found specific evidence for this claim, I've heard it said that actual minutes of the meetings of the city planners captures this intention to design cities to be conservative.
This idea I find completely striking. It is not the case of classism, where the rich are more conservative and thus live in large suburban mansions with their personal golf course in the back yard, but rather that well-off people are being conditioned into conservative ideals by their lack of interaction with people. This idea makes sense, as there are tons of wealthy people living in cities (Who else can live in those million dollar brownstones in Boston?) but they happen to be more liberal in tendency.
The Congress for the New Urbanism documents these ideas much better then I'm doing here. Their Charter, makes some interesting points and does a better job of fleshing out the complexity of the issues involved. In addition to the political tendencies that cities engender, by optimizing already developed areas, we can reduce our impact on the environment. This has been already realized by many European cities in the form of Green Belt Policies. I was amazed at how Europe has 10 times the population density of the US and yet there is so much green area. I spread these memes in passing, and turn again to some of my own thoughts.
Matt and I have been considering how this "space affecting interaction affecting people" idea is manifest on even the smaller level of living communities at MIT. In particular it seems striking to me that the reason why East Campus is particularly liberal is not because some how a large group of liberal, progressive, hippy MIT undergrads managed to get lotteried into the dorm and the culture just snowballed, but rather the actual architecture of the dorm has created such an environment. In particular the long connected hallways provides immediate line-of-sight to anyone who might else be out in the hall hanging out. Seeing people milling outside their room provides a nucleation site for interaction and suddenly people are talking and socializing and sharing ideas and expanding each other's minds. This is to be contrasted with Simmons, which has each long floor divided arbitrarily into towers so that in order to get from point A to point B, one has to really do some work in navigating different floors quickly so that one can get inside one's room and hunker down for the night. The only chance for interaction is maybe the elevators, which is often stifling, awkward, non-committal and brief. In fact it is interesting how each of the major MIT dormitories has an architecture which is conducive to the type of people which live there. Granted there is a process of selection on the part of the student, but for formation of these cultures they really are governed by the structure of the space.
This brings me nicely to one of my favorite living groups to visit, tEp. As Matt correctly points out the structure of the spaces for interaction in tEp really are conducive to certain activities and sometimes the disorientation caused by the frequent, bizarre happenings, is just what is needed to stretching ones consciousness and tolerance.
The effect now seems pretty self-evident. Interaction with people on a frequent basis, implies a wider exposure to opinion, culture, beliefs, and backgrounds. The necessity of sharing a common space and living area encourages tolerance in all of these dimensions. Tolerance often is the seed to open-thinking about various subjects and policies and consequently, dis-attachment from dogma, conservative values and general narrow thinking.
Of course an already existent inclination towards liberal thinking, has also promoted the growth of communes, but it is interesting to see the causality go the other way.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Math and Physics, Again....
My Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics class (24.111) is making me think of things again, which I learned to give up thinking about. It's this whole issue of taking as postulates that which we observe and then figuring out the mathematics from that.
I mean, this really bothers me and in a lot of ways, instead of sympathizing with the physicist, I've become more hard-lined as a mathematician. I often find myself asking the question "Why are the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a certain operator the only possibly observed states?" Often the response from my physicist friends is "That's just a question you don't ask in Quantum Mechanics." So that response, really bothers me. The second someone says "You can't ask that question," when apparently the question is well-formed, that is a quick line to raising my ire.
The other response I often get is "That's the way things have to be so that we can accurately model the observed data." This I suppose is what gets at the heart of the difference of the mathematician and the physicist. One views the sense-data as the starting point for inferential reasoning, the other only starts with well-defined things and checks periodically (or doesn't check at all) if it happens to match sense-data. It really is the ultimate clash between the bottom-up versus top-down approach, and which direction you prefer to go ultimately determines which camp you belong to. For me, sense-data stresses me out. It's confusing. You have to average things, because systems are often so complicated and have so many confounding variables, that you have to ignore the non-linearities of pretty much everything before you can actually say something about the "real world." By then, you're not talking about the real world, you're talking about some idealization of the real world which exists in platonic space and by then you should be doing mathematics and just burn the bridge that supposedly connects you to the real world.
Additionally, I'm a philosopher. I was fed skepticism for breakfast ever since I was a child. I'll never forget auditing my Dad's Philosophy 101 class at James Madison University when I was in middle school and first learning about Descartes and his meditations. The rational skepticism and inability to tell sleeping states from waking states fundamentally shook my faith in sense-data. Sure the electrons always split into "spin-up" and "spin-down" states when past through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, but I could just be dreaming and then what? I think always having that uncertainty that I might devote my life to understanding and explaining sense-data and then wake up into a parallel universe, where I find out my entire life was just some strange dream in some strange universe with strange physics, really undermines the feeling of value and worth in taking that path as a profession.
This brings me to the path which I have taken: the top-down approach. With this approach, at the end of the day, you really don't care too much if the structures you've built match what is "out there" because they're your structures and they are intrinsically beautiful,
independent of their relevance to the "outside world."
However you should do what you enjoy the most. If you are actively squirting dopamine and serotonin by thinking about the path of a charged, spinning particle, passing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, great. More power to you. When you die or wake up into that alternate universe, and find out that everything is different from what you thought it won't matter, because you enjoyed your life, and that is all that matters. So find out what you like and if its not math or physics, its bound to be something else, and if it is washing dishes so that you can spend your evenings partying like a rockstar, that's cool too. If its raising funds to feed hungry babies in Africa, that's also great. As long as your dopamine levels are high and this very moment you are glad to be experience something rather than nothing, you're living the good life. I realize the logic is backwards, but if I could've convinced myself that physics is worth doing, then I would enjoy doing it and would be happy devoting my life to it even it turned out to be a farce. Instead, my skepticism about the meaning of my activities, has led me to take a different path, but I'm enjoying the path and the sights it has to show me are truly breathtaking.
However the things which really bug me is when our beautiful mathematical structures do find their place in the "real world." It makes you wonder if this is the case because our mathematics shapes the way we can think about things, and thus the bias lies in the observer and not the observed, or it could be there is some weird underlying fabric of reality that is mathematical and does reside in some Platonic world of ideas, and our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue are just the biological interface for this digital graphing of mathematics into our minds.
So I'm left with a goal: To master all the mathematics in Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and see if really does lead me there. The journey will certainly take a while, but I'm up for the ride.
I mean, this really bothers me and in a lot of ways, instead of sympathizing with the physicist, I've become more hard-lined as a mathematician. I often find myself asking the question "Why are the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a certain operator the only possibly observed states?" Often the response from my physicist friends is "That's just a question you don't ask in Quantum Mechanics." So that response, really bothers me. The second someone says "You can't ask that question," when apparently the question is well-formed, that is a quick line to raising my ire.
The other response I often get is "That's the way things have to be so that we can accurately model the observed data." This I suppose is what gets at the heart of the difference of the mathematician and the physicist. One views the sense-data as the starting point for inferential reasoning, the other only starts with well-defined things and checks periodically (or doesn't check at all) if it happens to match sense-data. It really is the ultimate clash between the bottom-up versus top-down approach, and which direction you prefer to go ultimately determines which camp you belong to. For me, sense-data stresses me out. It's confusing. You have to average things, because systems are often so complicated and have so many confounding variables, that you have to ignore the non-linearities of pretty much everything before you can actually say something about the "real world." By then, you're not talking about the real world, you're talking about some idealization of the real world which exists in platonic space and by then you should be doing mathematics and just burn the bridge that supposedly connects you to the real world.
Additionally, I'm a philosopher. I was fed skepticism for breakfast ever since I was a child. I'll never forget auditing my Dad's Philosophy 101 class at James Madison University when I was in middle school and first learning about Descartes and his meditations. The rational skepticism and inability to tell sleeping states from waking states fundamentally shook my faith in sense-data. Sure the electrons always split into "spin-up" and "spin-down" states when past through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, but I could just be dreaming and then what? I think always having that uncertainty that I might devote my life to understanding and explaining sense-data and then wake up into a parallel universe, where I find out my entire life was just some strange dream in some strange universe with strange physics, really undermines the feeling of value and worth in taking that path as a profession.
This brings me to the path which I have taken: the top-down approach. With this approach, at the end of the day, you really don't care too much if the structures you've built match what is "out there" because they're your structures and they are intrinsically beautiful,
independent of their relevance to the "outside world."
However you should do what you enjoy the most. If you are actively squirting dopamine and serotonin by thinking about the path of a charged, spinning particle, passing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, great. More power to you. When you die or wake up into that alternate universe, and find out that everything is different from what you thought it won't matter, because you enjoyed your life, and that is all that matters. So find out what you like and if its not math or physics, its bound to be something else, and if it is washing dishes so that you can spend your evenings partying like a rockstar, that's cool too. If its raising funds to feed hungry babies in Africa, that's also great. As long as your dopamine levels are high and this very moment you are glad to be experience something rather than nothing, you're living the good life. I realize the logic is backwards, but if I could've convinced myself that physics is worth doing, then I would enjoy doing it and would be happy devoting my life to it even it turned out to be a farce. Instead, my skepticism about the meaning of my activities, has led me to take a different path, but I'm enjoying the path and the sights it has to show me are truly breathtaking.
However the things which really bug me is when our beautiful mathematical structures do find their place in the "real world." It makes you wonder if this is the case because our mathematics shapes the way we can think about things, and thus the bias lies in the observer and not the observed, or it could be there is some weird underlying fabric of reality that is mathematical and does reside in some Platonic world of ideas, and our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue are just the biological interface for this digital graphing of mathematics into our minds.
So I'm left with a goal: To master all the mathematics in Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and see if really does lead me there. The journey will certainly take a while, but I'm up for the ride.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Still Breathing...
So the term is underway and I seem to be managing everything OK. Although Prof. Melrose is a fantastic lecturer, I'm dropping 18.102. Funky Analysis will have to wait its turn. This was inspired by my decision to register for, and do the problem sets for 18.905 (Graduate Level Algebraic Topology). This has made life interesting and honestly it is my most interesting and stimulating class. So I'm taking 6 classes for credit, which is something I've never done before. I might actually make it through the semester, studying for GREs and applying to grad schools alive.
To be perfectly fair, my schedule isn't that crazy, as I'm doing a double dose of Algebraic Topology (18.904 & 18.905), and having the overlap makes me feel like I'm really just working on one really intense class instead of two. Furthermore, all my lecturers are really good and 18.701 (Abstract Algebra I) and 18.101 (Analysis on Manifolds) are welcome review of my Cambridge courses last year. This is a nice change of pace as I feel like doing an intense year of Cambridge maths, puts me on the giving rather than the receiving end of MIT.
21W.775 (Writing about Nature and the Environment) is proving to be a lot of reading and writing, but man, it is hard to complain when the assignments are naturalist essays like the work of Lewis Thomas. Reading for this class has really proved itself to be a nice break rather than another assignment. I guess it just replaces my leisure reading for the semester, but who can complain? It still amazes me that for some people this stuff IS their major and for them it IS WORK. I suppose this really feeds into the philosophy of education, but when I find myself procrastinating by reading Dante, I imagine what my academic life would be like if my work consisted of just reading and appreciating fine literature. Phew!
I don't mean to sound arrogant. Often classics programs at universities are ridiculously difficult just by design. Instead of spending hours thinking and doing mathematics, some people toil away picking out tone and mood changes in a 200 page book of poems every night. Let's be honest, universities like Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, MIT, and so on, could make basket-weaving the most difficult and intense course you've ever taken. It really makes one wonder: To what end?
This brings me to an interesting editorial I recently read in The Tech. It argues simply that life is hard and MIT is purposely difficult to help prepare you for life. I suppose that I'd forgotten about how getting knocked down to just get up again "helps build good character." On a humorous note, I laughed at the observation, of how only at MIT can you get into a fully packed elevator and yet everyone manages to avoid eye contact. I suppose the MIT's #3 ranking for "best undergraduate experience" was well earned the year I applied for admission.
Well, I'm out of breath and a whole world of dreams awaits my slumber.
To be perfectly fair, my schedule isn't that crazy, as I'm doing a double dose of Algebraic Topology (18.904 & 18.905), and having the overlap makes me feel like I'm really just working on one really intense class instead of two. Furthermore, all my lecturers are really good and 18.701 (Abstract Algebra I) and 18.101 (Analysis on Manifolds) are welcome review of my Cambridge courses last year. This is a nice change of pace as I feel like doing an intense year of Cambridge maths, puts me on the giving rather than the receiving end of MIT.
21W.775 (Writing about Nature and the Environment) is proving to be a lot of reading and writing, but man, it is hard to complain when the assignments are naturalist essays like the work of Lewis Thomas. Reading for this class has really proved itself to be a nice break rather than another assignment. I guess it just replaces my leisure reading for the semester, but who can complain? It still amazes me that for some people this stuff IS their major and for them it IS WORK. I suppose this really feeds into the philosophy of education, but when I find myself procrastinating by reading Dante, I imagine what my academic life would be like if my work consisted of just reading and appreciating fine literature. Phew!
I don't mean to sound arrogant. Often classics programs at universities are ridiculously difficult just by design. Instead of spending hours thinking and doing mathematics, some people toil away picking out tone and mood changes in a 200 page book of poems every night. Let's be honest, universities like Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, MIT, and so on, could make basket-weaving the most difficult and intense course you've ever taken. It really makes one wonder: To what end?
This brings me to an interesting editorial I recently read in The Tech. It argues simply that life is hard and MIT is purposely difficult to help prepare you for life. I suppose that I'd forgotten about how getting knocked down to just get up again "helps build good character." On a humorous note, I laughed at the observation, of how only at MIT can you get into a fully packed elevator and yet everyone manages to avoid eye contact. I suppose the MIT's #3 ranking for "best undergraduate experience" was well earned the year I applied for admission.
Well, I'm out of breath and a whole world of dreams awaits my slumber.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Fall 2007 Course Selection
Alright! Enough! Here it is: My Fall Course Selection.
For Credit:
18.101 - Analysis on Manifolds
18.701 - Algebra I
18.904 - Seminar in Topology
24.111 - Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues
For Listening Fun:
18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis
18.905 - Algebraic Topology
For Credit:
18.101 - Analysis on Manifolds
18.701 - Algebra I
18.904 - Seminar in Topology
24.111 - Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues
For Listening Fun:
18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis
18.905 - Algebraic Topology
Classification Theorem for Compact Surfaces
So this was actually the "Theorem of the Day" about a month ago, but allow me my delayed public display of math wanking. Get use to it, because at Cambridge I was surrounded with mathematicians and these urges were often released in more...err...natural, consensual ways. Now back on the other side of the puddle, surrounded by engineers, I have to release my math juices all over this wonderful interweb. Taken from W.S. Massey's Algebraic Topology: An Introduction (GTM 56). Only a taste of things to come in 18.904 - Seminar in Topology.
Theorem 5.1 Any compact surface is either homeomorphic to a sphere, or to a connected sum of tori, or to a connected sum of projective planes.
Ahh Man... So pretty. Spend some time in projective space and you might never want to come back to your drab everyday world.
Theorem 5.1 Any compact surface is either homeomorphic to a sphere, or to a connected sum of tori, or to a connected sum of projective planes.
Ahh Man... So pretty. Spend some time in projective space and you might never want to come back to your drab everyday world.
Quantum Mechanics and Experience
One of the classes I'll be taking this semester is 24.111 - Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. Today I just bought the required text, Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Z. Albert. The book looks pretty good, with a solid layman introduction to the foundational principles of quantum mechanics.
My dance with Quantum Mechanics (QM) has been a really interesting one. Prior to my coursework this past year at Cambridge, I objected to the conclusions of quantum mechanics advertised in popular science books because it ran against my mental model of the universe. My struggles with the conceptual foundations of QM were very much in the same vein as Einstein's critique of the theory. The idea that probability has a real existent status deeply troubled me. Always before, probability was a description of averages and distributions. A coin toss -- the idol of probability -- was still fundamentally governed by Newton's Laws, the forces in the room, the initial configuration of the coin in your hand, the torque, the impulse of your thumb on the coin, the chaotic turbulence of the air molecules in the room, the list goes on but all the initial configurations and momenta could theoretically be specified and then the entire motion could be simulated as the solution of a large system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) -- Laplace's Demon all over again. But QM is a whole different bag of nuts... Instead of solving specifically for things like position and momentum and energy, you have state vectors, and your eigenfunctions of these operators form the basis of an infinite-dimensional space known as Hilbert space. What's new about all of this is that our description of a particle is described by the time evolution of the coefficients of each of these eigenfunctions. Now we can't perceive this superposition, but rather -- and this is the really crazy bit of the whole theory -- only the eigenfunctions can be measured. So our particle is like a point wandering around in infinite dimensional Hilbert space when no one is looking. It's like Mr. Observer finally shines his flashlight in the car window and asks "Hey!?! What are you kids doing?!?" and our couple is always caught in any one of these (usually an infinite number of) compromising positions, but they're never caught scrambling to put clothes on or in a acrobatic transition or superposition of pages of the Kama Quantum Sutra.
So it will be interesting to see what insights 24.111 will bring, and complemented with 18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis, this should be a tantalizing semester spent exploring Hilbert space!
My dance with Quantum Mechanics (QM) has been a really interesting one. Prior to my coursework this past year at Cambridge, I objected to the conclusions of quantum mechanics advertised in popular science books because it ran against my mental model of the universe. My struggles with the conceptual foundations of QM were very much in the same vein as Einstein's critique of the theory. The idea that probability has a real existent status deeply troubled me. Always before, probability was a description of averages and distributions. A coin toss -- the idol of probability -- was still fundamentally governed by Newton's Laws, the forces in the room, the initial configuration of the coin in your hand, the torque, the impulse of your thumb on the coin, the chaotic turbulence of the air molecules in the room, the list goes on but all the initial configurations and momenta could theoretically be specified and then the entire motion could be simulated as the solution of a large system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) -- Laplace's Demon all over again. But QM is a whole different bag of nuts... Instead of solving specifically for things like position and momentum and energy, you have state vectors, and your eigenfunctions of these operators form the basis of an infinite-dimensional space known as Hilbert space. What's new about all of this is that our description of a particle is described by the time evolution of the coefficients of each of these eigenfunctions. Now we can't perceive this superposition, but rather -- and this is the really crazy bit of the whole theory -- only the eigenfunctions can be measured. So our particle is like a point wandering around in infinite dimensional Hilbert space when no one is looking. It's like Mr. Observer finally shines his flashlight in the car window and asks "Hey!?! What are you kids doing?!?" and our couple is always caught in any one of these (usually an infinite number of) compromising positions, but they're never caught scrambling to put clothes on or in a acrobatic transition or superposition of pages of the Kama Quantum Sutra.
So it will be interesting to see what insights 24.111 will bring, and complemented with 18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis, this should be a tantalizing semester spent exploring Hilbert space!
PKD Defines Reality
Part of my inspiration to start blogging was to capture daily whims. Everything from "Song of the Day" to "Quote of the Day" to the more idiosyncratic "Theorem of the Day". So here it goes:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick
'nuff said.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick
'nuff said.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Rudie Can't Fail -- The Clash
You know how sometimes a song seems to narrate your day? Well the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack really delivered today. I banged out my Marshall application with a really good feeling. Life is definitely good.
Getting some cash for my birthday and I'm seriously considering going wild and buying a digital SLR. Unfortunately, one of the incredible deals I came across appears to have disappeared. So now things are getting expensive, and I wonder if I should just stay within my means. One part of me cries out Thoreau's maxim "Simplify, Simplify!" But family members and an other part of me considers a good camera to be an investment in art, a chance to create physical instantiations of my internal appreciation of the beauty that surrounds us.
I think I'll meditate on this one.
Getting some cash for my birthday and I'm seriously considering going wild and buying a digital SLR. Unfortunately, one of the incredible deals I came across appears to have disappeared. So now things are getting expensive, and I wonder if I should just stay within my means. One part of me cries out Thoreau's maxim "Simplify, Simplify!" But family members and an other part of me considers a good camera to be an investment in art, a chance to create physical instantiations of my internal appreciation of the beauty that surrounds us.
I think I'll meditate on this one.
Anamnesis: PKD and Plato
So today I decided to treat myself to a new book: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
I've always enjoyed the thoughts of PKD and this appears to be an excellent compilation of his philosophical corpus. In August 2006, I read A Scanner Darkly and Valis in rapid succession. At times, I found myself getting really wrapped up and carried away with the ideas in Valis. I became intrigued with the idea that there is some sort of secret knowledge to be attained and that the attainment of said knowledge could lead to the transcendence of the current level of reality.
Of course as a rational thinker, when making a coherent mental model of reality I can't completely ignore sense-data. However, as a mathematician I also feel that there are structures that are in some sense more fundamentally real then the things which I perceive with my five senses. When comparing the statements
Although mathematicians are careful creatures -- when pressed they will fall back into a more conservative outlook on the ontological status of mathematics -- when we are not observed, we tend to really believe in the Platonist outlook -- that there is a realm of fundamental forms that exists on a different level from our material universe and that the interplay between these worlds is as beautiful and intriguing as we could possibly hope for.
This leads me finally to the key word in the title of this post: Anamnesis. Lawrence Sutin describes it as "the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato" and he hits the nail on the head. He uses it to describe what is for PKD ideally the case, with the other option being that people like Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, The Gnostics, PKD and a lot of mathematicians (maybe not all at once) are all totally wacked out bouncing-bananas-in-straight-jackets crazy.
Of course as a rational thinker, when making a coherent mental model of reality I can't completely ignore sense-data. However, as a mathematician I also feel that there are structures that are in some sense more fundamentally real then the things which I perceive with my five senses. When comparing the statements
- Snow is white.
- Over the ring of integers, 1+1=2.
Although mathematicians are careful creatures -- when pressed they will fall back into a more conservative outlook on the ontological status of mathematics -- when we are not observed, we tend to really believe in the Platonist outlook -- that there is a realm of fundamental forms that exists on a different level from our material universe and that the interplay between these worlds is as beautiful and intriguing as we could possibly hope for.
This leads me finally to the key word in the title of this post: Anamnesis. Lawrence Sutin describes it as "the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato" and he hits the nail on the head. He uses it to describe what is for PKD ideally the case, with the other option being that people like Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, The Gnostics, PKD and a lot of mathematicians (maybe not all at once) are all totally wacked out bouncing-bananas-in-straight-jackets crazy.
Testing the Waters...
I have finally decided to try the blogging experience. Motivated by my friend Curran, I've decided to expose myself to the world in an almost frightening way. So what do I see as the future and purpose of this blog? To report on daily events? Hardly. To dump my photos for friends and family to see and span the gap in this increasingly impersonal world? Almost certainly.
Ultimately, I just want to spread open my own little canvas to the world. Ideally this will open a fissure to help blow off the constant buildup of thoughts and speculations that too often don't get vented. As a child I use to pen entire subjective worlds, setting up my own imaginative premises and following their inevitable logical implcations. Although I think I secretly desired my words to be read, I couldn't bare the possibly scrutiny of my contemporaries. Perhaps published posthumously, protected by the barrier of death would my memes be absorbed and distributed among people -- my soul a dandelion dispersed by the mighty wind of some future publishing company!
But alas! The internet revolution is here and my port key into other minds is as simple as a click of the button! So let the stream of consciousness begin! Whether a trickle or a torrent of thought at least I can say I've added a drop to this great ocean that is collective consciousness!
Ultimately, I just want to spread open my own little canvas to the world. Ideally this will open a fissure to help blow off the constant buildup of thoughts and speculations that too often don't get vented. As a child I use to pen entire subjective worlds, setting up my own imaginative premises and following their inevitable logical implcations. Although I think I secretly desired my words to be read, I couldn't bare the possibly scrutiny of my contemporaries. Perhaps published posthumously, protected by the barrier of death would my memes be absorbed and distributed among people -- my soul a dandelion dispersed by the mighty wind of some future publishing company!
But alas! The internet revolution is here and my port key into other minds is as simple as a click of the button! So let the stream of consciousness begin! Whether a trickle or a torrent of thought at least I can say I've added a drop to this great ocean that is collective consciousness!
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