further

Zeynep rides a red motorcycle across the country

One supposes she will never crash

Just ride out into the sunset, forever

Like the appropriate citation

For a half-remembered paragraph

That one agreed with entirely

But neglected to bookmark,

And so, it's gone.

maths of god

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Shield-Trinity-Scutum-Fidei-compact.svg/1000px-Shield-Trinity-Scutum-Fidei-compact.svg.png

Deus forms a "cone" over the other nodes. There are no
higher-order triples. There is no "excluded middle"
between being and non-being.

conceptual/anti-conceptual

Outsiders see mathematics as a cold, formal, logical,
mechanical, monolithic process of sheer intellection; we
argue that insofar as it is successful, mathematics is a
social, informal, intuitive, organic, human process, a
community project. -- Social Processes and Proofs of
Theorems and Programs, DeMillo, Lipton, and Perlis.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be
understood through a study of the messages and the
communication facilities which belong to it; and that in
the future development of these messages and communication
facilities, messages between man and machines, between
machines and man, and between machine and machine, are
destined to play an ever-increasing part. -- The Human
Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener.

ecosophy

"Guattari holds that traditional environmentalist perspectives obscure
the complexity of the relationship between humans and their natural
environment through its maintenance of the dualistic separation of
human (cultural) and nonhuman (natural) systems; he envisions ecosophy
as a new field with a monistic and pluralistic approach to such study.
Ecology in the Guattarian sense then, is a study of complex phenomena,
including human subjectivity, the environment, and social relations,
all of which are intimately interconnected. Despite this emphasis on
interconnection, throughout his individual writings and more famous
collaborations with Gilles Deleuze Guattari has resisted calls for
holism, preferring to emphasise heterogeneity and difference,
synthesising assemblages and multiplicities in order to trace
rhizomatic structures rather than creating unified and, holisitic
structures." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosophy

the god complex

«From our perspective, hochmah is that "higher wisdom" that some
systems call primordial Awareness. [...] Binah, meaning understanding,
is a kind of partner to Hochmah. The sefirot are often gendered
(sometimes multi-gendered), and their interaction is often depicted as
a series of erotic interchanges. In this case, Hochmah is the male and
Binah is female, the Divine womb, the generative principle of the rest
of the universe. [...] Binah and Hochmah map easily onto "left brain"
and "right brain" thinking, even though the Kabbalists presumably had
no scientific knowledge of the brain's internal structure.»
--http://learnkabbalah.com/keter_hochmah_and_binah/

I've been attempting to redrawing the standard "tree of life" as a
phase diagram in three dimensions. It's quite tricky to get the
drawing right, partly because Beauty is adjacent to nearly
everything... :)

One of the striking characteristics of the figure is that the Tower
and Strength/Lust form a very noticeable division between the two
"hemispheres", perhaps playing a role something like the "corpus
callosum" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum)? This is
mirrored again by the Empress, but in a way that seems structurally
different. In my drawing, Binah/Understanding, Hochmah/Wisdom, and
Kether/Crown are projected "inside" of Tifaret/Beauty. For
comparison, the hippocampus appears deep within the temporal lobe...

I'm hand-selecting a picture of the brain with just about the right
number of components (accounting for left and right side):
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brain-anatomy.jpg -- but
developing well-thought-through correspondences in a coherent fashion
will have to wait for a later date.

For the moment I'm just intrigued by the idea of Malkuth/Kingdom as
the nervous system *outside* of the brain. What if the
World/Universe corresponds to the corticospinal tract (motor), the
Moon to the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway (fine touch,
vibration sensation and proprioception), and The Aeon to the
spinothalamic tract (pain, temperature, itch and crude touch)? This
all makes a certain amount of sense to me...

last fragment of a half a manifesto

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it
claimed was false, but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly
complete path to understanding life and reality. Cybernetic
eschatology shares with some of history's worst ideologies a doctrine
of historical predestination. There is nothing more gray, stultifying,
or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us
hope that the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in
the sun arrives." -- Jaron Lanier,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html

back to work

"Desktops inspire the ultimate fantasy as business accoutrements are
knocked to the floor with one fell swoop of a worsted-clad arm
(difficult with all the PC equipment, I know - all those leads and
plugs and mouse-mats), buns are unpinned, spectacles torn off, plus
all that ice-cold laminated chipboard stretching out beneath you with
just the odd unseen paperclip or stapler to mar the magic of the
moment." -- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/when-a-colleague-becomes-a-lover-1153739.html