projective imagery

When Einstein conducts one of his thought experiments, he is modelling in his mind the universe as he conceives it. He imagines that he is travelling on a beam of light. He is holding up a mirror twelve inches from his face. What happens? he asks himself. There is nothing to be seen in the mirror. At 186,000 miles per second, nothing can overtake me; nothing travels faster. So, if my image cannot travel faster than the speed of light, then it can never arrive at the surface of the mirror. That’s the thought experiment, based upon the Einsteinian model. And if I now create a phrase to encapsulate it and say ‘travelling at the speed of light is an endless stare into an empty mirror’ I have created my metaphor. One thing – the speed of light – is another – a stare into an empty mirror; each belongs to a different intellectual genus.

Housekeeping

"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living." -Samuel Beckett

reality monitoring

...“You have to take in outside information, record it accurately and with a high degree of fidelity. You have to be able to monitor your internal thoughts, recognize they’re occurring internally, and remember them. Then you have to compare the inside with the outside. In a healthy brain, this happens without us even being aware of it.

Holiday Romance

One day the King was going to the office, when he stopped at the fishmonger’s to buy a pound and a half of salmon not too near the tail, which the Queen (who was a careful housekeeper) had requested him to send home.  Mr Pickles, the fishmonger, said, “Certainly, sir, is there any other article, Good-morning.”

The King went on towards the office in a melancholy mood, for quarter day was such a long way off, and several of the dear children were growing out of their clothes.  He had not proceeded far, when Mr Pickles’s errand-boy came running after him, and said, “Sir, you didn’t notice the old lady in our shop.”

“What old lady?” enquired the King.  “I saw none.”

Now, the King had not seen any old lady, because this old lady had been invisible to him, though visible to Mr Pickles’s boy.  Probably because he messed and splashed the water about to that degree, and flopped the pairs of soles down in that violent manner, that, if she had not been visible to him, he would have spoilt her clothes.

Just then the old lady came trotting up.  She was dressed in shot-silk of the richest quality, smelling of dried lavender.

“King Watkins the First, I believe?” said the old lady.

“Watkins,” replied the King, “is my name.”

y croit encore

......les mots «mensonge» et «calomnies» sont répétés à plusieurs reprises par les deux débatteurs, et qui se termine par un «vous êtes un petit calomniateur» de toute beauté de la part de...

axiological ethics

Stubborn truth

When Jean Piaget conducted his famous experiments on object permanence-in which once an object was covered up, the baby seemed to forget about it-Piaget concluded that the baby had been unable to store the memory of the object: out of sight, out of mind. The paradigm of the perpetual present has now itself been forgotten. Even infants are aware of the past, as many remarkable experiments have shown. Babies can’t speak but they can imitate, and if shown a series of actions with props, even 6-month-old infants will repeat a three-step sequence a day later. Nine-month-old infants will repeat it a month later.

Overwhelmingly

They talked always of pothouses, of feeding-time – by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt, their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet inattackable; for they didn’t count their talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, to reappraise.

Elegíe

ZEITGEIST (La Chanson du Dimanche S05E10) de lachansondudimanche

Vrére

Vouloir signifie se maintenir à tout prix dans un état d’exaspération et de fièvre. L’effort est épuisant et il n’est pas dit que l’homme puisse le soutenir toujours. (La chute dans le temps)

Innate

Speech speed is measured by syllables per second, and density of information is measured by how much information is encoded per syllable. What does that mean? Let’s take an example from English. The one-syllable word “calm” is information dense because it expresses a complex state with only one-syllable. However, “easy-going” uses four syllables to express an idea easily conveyed with fewer syllables. By averaging the information density across a language, the linguists determined the density of information per language.

Read more at http://hotword.dictionary.com/fastlanguage/#WmgrOKFhVjmBXDeV.99

Craft

For listeners (and readers), stories instruct. From Aesop's fables to essays in women's magazines, they encourage us to think about what happens to people (or anthropomorphized animals) who, say, behave more like hares than tortoises or have a threesome with their best friend and her husband. Stories socialize. By demonstrating the intricacies of human relationships, novels and memoirs encourage us to rehearse what we would do and say in a variety of situations: platonic, familial, and maybe especially romantic. Stories, particularly fictional ones—moralize. They help us figure out our values and whet our need for justice.

Human Action

'...determinism seems to pose to human free agency. It is hard to see how, if the state of the world 1000 years ago fixes everything I do during my life, I can meaningfully say that I am a free agent, the author of my own actions, which I could have freely chosen to perform differently. After all, I have neither the power to change the laws of nature, nor to change the past! So in what sense can I attribute freedom of choice to myself? Philosophers have not lacked ingenuity in devising answers to this question. There is a long tradition of compatibilists arguing that freedom is fully compatible with physical determinism. Hume went so far as to argue that determinism is a necessary condition for freedom—or at least, he argued that some causality principle along the lines of “same cause, same effect” is required. There have been equally numerous and vigorous responses by those who are not convinced. Can a clear understanding of what determinism is, and how it tends to succeed or fail in real physical theories, shed any light on the controversy?'