academia…

Thinking space was suspended due to  unfavourable conditions. Writing will either cease altogether or recommence in the near future.

quantum physics via video…

Well…what does one do when the computer is playing up and you can’t work properly but you’re getting a little access to the net. Perhaps a brief visit to the check out quantum physics via videos of Hans Beth. Try also for something completely different – Google Sketchup …okay back to being an ad campaign for gooooooogel again – but it is worth trying…even if only for a play…

so i’m having a suck day… it shows huh?

At least I found a funky image

gurgle scholar is not well :/

Due to some gremlins in the works, gurgle scholar has had an attack of non-functionality and may continue to have hiccups unless some net fairies come to the rescue – poor Gurgle…

…and whilst gurgle is on sick leave…here is something to ponder from the page of the Dalai Lama:

“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world.” by Shanti Deva

embracing the unfinished, the unresolved, the paradoxical

Ever so slowly dawning, is the realisation that embracing paradox and the unresolved as emergent phenomena can be meaningful beyond the push for realisation. There are a thousand million people out there who know more, know less, know broader, know more deeply than I, yet, as it is for all other sentient beings, no two people will ever know what I know in the way that I know it. This is both a solace and a source of disconsolation. This is being human: this is being / becoming. it is difficult to embrace and to let be at the same time, to allow, to facilitate a play of concepts that defy resolution as surely as a bucket of live eels defy any attempt to weave them into plaits. Is there then, a resonance… a vibration that keeps these things together, bumping up against one another, a cosmic push and pull, the second law of thermodynamics that ensures that as much as matter disperses, the gravitational attraction in that same context can ensure a clumping together – drawn together – but dispersed – scattered yet finding ways to gather – concepts, people, minds and dare I say it, the human spirit itself – is not one – can never be one. Delicious thoughts – even more so were the thinker a writer too – but words – as much as they are who I am – escape my mind without poetry – earnestness not matched by literary beauty – that is not mine alas. And there it is, the centripetal, the centrifugal vibrating in and out of sync until some resonance hits its mark and for a phrase there just might be a note of music.

academia :) or :/ ? the good, the bad, the ugly & just maybe …fun

academia – the place of ultimate qquirque – where the best you can do is to stay out of the road of the nasty pasties who are out there to rip you off as fast as you can come up with the concepts – but this time my dear schadenfreude colleagues; i believe that i might just have circumvented your deleterious dabblings : )

and the very bestest bit – there are no nasty games involved – goody goody goody – just smart out-thinking – perhaps I should not boast – not that you would read this – but am rather enjoying the prospect of future facial expressions – rather a lot actually : )

and to those colleagues of mine who are assisting in the entertaining of the next big ‘thang’ – i thank you greatly – aaaahhh perhaps tea and scones all round when it comes off eh what? Naaahhh bugger that for a joke – let’s go and get right royally sloshed – preferably on something worthy….

and to all those other academics out there who are sick and tired of appalling behaviour by your colleagues – remain optimistic – there are some of us who believe that research is actually to add something positive to the state of the planet and that sometimes some of us do things for altruistic as well as egotistic reasons and furthermore that it does not have to entail damaging, maiming and ripping off others in the process….. co-operation can work : )

Ubuntu & other unix type delites : )

Photoshop stuffing around this week – apart from several million other thangs. Found a site that is a bit of a strange one. Why is it strange? Well for a site that is all about graf stuff it has a front page that is all txt.. regardless, it has some helpful basic well explained tips : )

Today, investigated the possibility of partitioning an external HD and then installing Ubuntu or other distro – seems like the consensus is – don’t do it. Ubuntu doesn’t like x HDs – rats! Suggestions are to run something else and for a complete novice/newbie such as myself, it is apparently a recipe for potential disaster :/ Actually if people knew the messes I am capable of creating they would have YELLED at me loudly to not do it. Anyway, seems like someone is going to let me have another desktop to play with – oooooo goodie, goodie, goodie : ) aren’t I lucky! Not quite sure where to start but hey… Decided to come up with or find (there has to be one out there) a kind of linux database thang – not sure that BibTeX looks any good – had a peruse of that for LaTeX – not quite what I had in mind. So sick and tire of constantly upgrading software and the need for more funds to keep things afloat – groan – and also trying to get rid of paper – have a pile of pdfs et cetera but how does one store all this shit without paper? Must admit – I like paper but want to be able to store really raw stuff so that I can import, export without junk attached – should make it more accessible and constantly usable into future – that’s the theory. Am living in a fire hazard abode that is about to get a helluva lot worse cos new office is about half the size – rats again!!!

In process of digitising music – geeeeeees it’s slowwwwwwww…. and will do the same for image library – luckily i had a hissy fit and cut up a whole lot of negs and trannies – no – not lucky – very very bad – all bad :/

One day, I might just catch up to the 2oth century – yes – I know that we have already leapt a century on – gimme a break – always was a slow learner : )

If anyone has any brilliant ideas – let me know. In relation to Ubuntu will run two desktops off the one monitor via a switch will gimme a little more space and means I can stuff around to my heart’s content and not stuff up my non-partitioned internal HD with all my real stuff on it : ) So lucky – so very very lucky and fortunate to be in such a wonderful tech support land – even if they are not really unix people… thanks again guys – it’s going to be marvellous to play without fear of disaster – ok – knowing that I’ll crash the new old HD and it won’t matter : ) Aren’t you all envious that I’ll get to play like that?

just browsers…

From the folks at browsehappy a few reasons for using search engines other than explorer or netscape.  Yes, short, quickie today – just decided to promote anything other than the previous big guys with all their money – yay – go for it – wouldn’t it be ‘nice’ if the net truly did become open source? – and relatively divested of big hungry corporations?  The site given has links to download the following:

not sure whose page this is…might be worth a look…seems okay : )

I’m feeling lucky… lost in wiki world

Are you feeling lucky? No, I wasn’t particularly feeling lucky but I just thought – hmmm – what happens if you type a single word into googggglleeee and hit the I’m feeling lucky button. It seems that I was trapped into a vortex of wikipedia. I typed in city, hit I’m feel lucky and ended up at wikipedia – then with any word. I was having a very wiki moment. I did not feel lucky at all. I think I shall now go to the same location and type in lucky and see what happens… wait here a minute… and I’ll get back to you… go and do something else ’til I get back…

Ooooh dear – I do not recommend that at all! I ended up on some page with “lucky” magazine – which is not, as some might imagine a sex magazine – no, it’s some very pink looking women’s shopping type of frippery or antoher. I couldn’t really look – it was too pink to keep viewing – would have lost my lunch! Incidentally, when you type in “I’m feeling lucky” and hit the button of the same name, you are instantly directed to the ggoooooggle help center. I guess they figure that you would have to be desperate to do that and respond accordingly.

Since this blog is even more devoid of content that usual – yes, i know that is difficult to conceive of – I thought that I would do a quick image search for “lucky” and came up with the pussly cat of that name. Alright – confession – this is a truly awful blog with not much to it. I didn’t promise anything did I?

 

short piece: philosophical muse on binary

Confession… I’m eccentric. There we are, that’s it. Now that’s done. As odd as I am and now, as everyone knows, as oddly as I think – wherein the entire world is a wonderful puzzle full of incredible things that perpetually bring me such pleasure to contemplate – … oooh dear lost myself in that sentence. No matter. Today’s curiosity – for me is this:

0011 0000 is binary for 0 and of course 0011 0001 is binary for 1

I’ve been playing with binary for a week and today it hit me – what a delicious paradox – how wonderful. It is as fractal as GNU – gnu not unix – same stuff – enfolding on itself in perpetual motion. So when did people say that po mo emerged (‘post modernism’ for people who are not wankers)? Surely that was supposedly after binary. There’s a whole beautiful dimension isn’t there that reducing stuff to code produces the utterly non reductionist expansion of zero s and one s.

And just in case you thought that binary number systems (as opposed to computer stuff) arose in the 20th century – think again and look to India. I found one serious paper of historical interest in particular: B. van Nooten, “Binary numbers in Indian antiquity.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 21(1), 31-50, 1993, and I also found a quirky little piece of only a few pages with a few tasty morsels to be going on with – sure beats the disinterest of a click track in recording studio – in terms of contemplation of rhythm and drummers. Okay – so I dated a drummer once – yep – it’s true – just in case you were wondering. So much for this being a page of any scholastic merit… no worries… I’m having fun, even if no one else drops by. : )

In 1695, good ol’ Gotfried Leibniz dug up binary stuff but a long, long time after Pingala – 200BC if I recall….he was actually looking at different meters in Sanskrit sacred text and I think was looking at the short versus long kinda stuff – hence the binary development of various combinatorial investigations – i guess looking at various possible iterations et cetera.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn’t it truly superb that several centuries of thinking can exist side by side on a page – the first from a person more interested in the mathematics of the sacred and the second more interested in the pursuit in the perfection of the ultimate objectivist language – and in keeping with Hobbes – cogitatio est computatio.

so what is today’s aphorism? cogitato est blog? blog is soo very unlatin – there has to be a better saying than that surely… cogito ergo blog : )

meetings, bloody meetings

yes… that was my day…alright I actually achieved a lot in the meetings but… I do rather working away in my own little bubble – ’specially some days.

I wasn’t going to use this blog for fluff – guess I blew it huh?