2006/09/29

septender

u see war on tv 2? fux. i gotsta get mo flagz a-pinnin' on me jacquet.
i need to watch things die
from a good safe distance
vicariously, i live while
the whole world dies
...
(like blood to a vampire)
plus
ma please, wont you flush it all away?
thx. maynard et al.

2006/09/28

Ultrahigh-speed HR liquids photography.

2006/09/26

more short

Jennifer cut the candle's wick too
short men never complain to tall girls
can cry and boys can
't
they say but I doubt it I doubt it
thank you very much
for the light.

2006/09/25

Camel

A short sketch, created as a warm-up exercise for learning German diction. I believe there is a story–tho I forget the author–called "Bolivia," which makes no reference whatsoever to that country. Enjoy.
Woke up desolated in a hothouse. Fern tugging at my lashes, fingers in a cactus, showes full of loam, look: condensation on the walls and spiderwebs. Must be the sevenh month, September. Fat handlecrank on the door. A sign: Do Not Enter Research Area. Window in the door shows rows of tables under flourescent gasflame blue copperflame green lightning intermittent bulbs. Sweat warm in here, hungry, no comestibles conveniently toumescent in a hydroponic drip-drop. Clang! the handle; again Clang! and crunching on fallen leaves the portal clears. Nobody's swept, somethings amiss then.

Smelled like your standard orverworked servomotor: ozone. Overoxygenated room staggering through a flickering drunk test sends its white-blue-white-green-blue-white central aisle under where your feet would be if you weren't listening to that sixty-cycle buzz and wondering what sort of plant leaves reddish sap behind. Sixty-cycle-buzz plus a click-click our lungs are failing jibber from the tubes in their metal sockets hanging from the grillwork on the underside of aluminum ceiling panels. Farside doorframe filled. No airlock, see, it was just a security door with the silver-C handle and the bolt shot across and back by the key hungdown in a breaker box at lefthand, with well-greased turnpins, and whispered as cool corridor conditioned breathstuff sucks in over a sweating forearm.

It's dark and uniform and lit with LED runners da-dashingaway on the left, qu-comming on the right, headlight tinted, lonely, ominous. One creased receipt for diphenhydramine and something–surgical masks?– twenty feet away. Not dusty, nothing's been dusty, except your left shouder in Amanensis spores and Helianthus pollen. Well better if there's no draft and the contented steel panel clicks its tongue to a readying stillness, left out, right back, curving away with terrible acoustics absorbing even footsteps into elephantine lubdub shudds.

Past submarine ports fast and unsqueking against all effort and it turned out welded. Past a window into an interior space, unlit, maybe deskgarten, maybe gurneys, too quiet without meterspaced whooshing echoes punctuating as splash ripples do a drop into a bowl the white conditioning apparatus which doesn't move air noise. Better errant than begrabt, better du ciel than terrestris. Interiori Purgatorio ipsi, quam dimidium huic, mei factus ero oblivisci tum ego quandocumque? Gunmettle and Airforce Blue bolted down placard "COMMONS." It opened easily enough.

Lead pipes for a ballustrade, a plasticine running ledge, blasts of Sol-yellow breaking over a great open indoor bazaar, a crowd in flowing cotton draped over frames like fashion models, a hot dusty trembling billow of Fair Week, a grumbling of gabble, and above perched as though nothing more natural and sane could be concived to replace in in the place of honor a great clear pane displaying magnificently a ruddy terrifying endlessness of swollen stars. The stars were easily recognized by the boiling, malevolent light that signalled their final spiteful hate for every form of life. What they could not abandon they would destroy.

The question had slipped casually up through an overworked spinal column, seeping through the cerebellum, flowing around the parietal lobe, ducking the thalamus, and rested, snug and molting in the corpus colosum, and now it gouged and bit and clawed its way into the frintal lobes and refused to go away. The obvious question, now that it displays itself, sloughing the bandersnatch skin of oneiroamnesia. Answers charged forward from the future, but could never have been going to arrive before they would have been able to leave, and apoplexy set in.
Hey, not evey science fiction author can come up with a word like 'oneiroamnesia', okay?

2006/09/24

I think mah Heart's a-'Splodin!

Or, let's check in with Davey and J-boyee.
Apparently it works pretty well. All I know is that something about it is very attractive to my inner geek. Also, my inner nerd would like to read a sociology of science paper analyzing the process by which computer scientists came to choose the labels 'Master' and 'Nagger'. source

2006/09/23

Breakfast


Can you say "bachelor"?

2006/09/22

The blue, red, and polka-dot pills.


















After yesterday's allusions to Martin Buber I'd like to tribute-ize another great thinker. Doctor Gonzo's friend.

2006/09/21

a link (for once!)

reproduced pomes.

thou art my endless evening.
thou art my endless summer dwindling monarch flutter along the road.
thou art a jaundiced view of justice leaning close to her lover.
thou art clementine and dewberries.

thou art thine art, mine art, my heart.
thou art rotting fruit so saccharine.
thou art the martyr in her body's wasted putrefaction.
thou art my sabi, my ownmost, my journey.

thou art my original.
thou art my endless simoon, thou art.
you stood at rhodes, you stood at waterloo.
thou art my failed christ.

thou art imagined in perfected perfection.
thou art my incompleteness made flesh.
thou art safe, a killer turned mail over my shoulders draped.
thou art my fear, thou art my you, thou art ever and ever and ever.

cast seeds among cacti and succulents.
thou art not deity nor supernatural nor more than anyone.
thou art no less than everyone.
thou art what thou art outside of me and in my mind.

thou art recollections in amber photographs of our ancestors.
thou art a war between brothers.
thou art a child of eros and thanatos.
we're not not, not null, not death, not yet.

2006/09/19

Yar!

2006/09/02

Scheduled Hiatus announcement.

Until September 21.

2006/09/01

Woah. Just, woah.

Do you people really believe incoherent clap-trap, or are you just putting me on? Seriously. Can anyone explain this "theory of nothingness" page to me? I thought not.

But then if you had to explain yourself, you might find you didn't have a clue what you were saying...

[NB: clearly "Akira Bergman" thinks what is posted on the above mentioned blog has some sort of spiritual/intellectual merit; what this might be is beyond the feeble abilities of our editorial fact-checkers. --f.]

A thought or two, to pass the time.

The first two sections of Richard Cartwright (1979) are a discussion of various formulations of Leibniz’ Law and similar indiscernibility principles. These are not to be confused with identity principles or substitutivity principles. The going theory seems to be that
(I) ∀x∀y∀z(x=y→[z a property of x → z a property of y])
is a schema, or at least a principle, of which all indiscernibility principles are instances: one could call it the indiscernibility principle. (In the article, it’s (1).) Each identity principle has an associated comprehension principle (pp294-5):
Suppose φ and φ' are expressions in which α, α' respectively appear as free variables and are identical except that each place of α in one is taken by α′ in the other. Suppose φ'' is an expression like φ except it has variable β in the positions α took in φ. Suppose γ is a bound variable ≠β in φ''. Then some universal closure of
+∃γ∀β(γ a property of β ↔ φ'') + [here, '+' replaces corner notation, or "Frege quotes"] is a comprehension principle for relevant universal closures of the schema
+∀α∀α′(α=α' → (φ→φ')+
for example, the comprehension principle of

∀ζ∀χ∀υ(χ=υ → (ζ a property of χ→ζ a property of υ))

is

∀χ∃ζ∀υ(ζ a property of υ ↔ χ=υ);

which is to say, there is some particular property which obtains in υ if and only if υ and χ are one and the same. One must specify such a property!


Such a property is peculiar to χ and to υ and to no other entities, and χ≣υ (strict equivalence between what is denoted by χ, υ).
The indiscernibility principle is supposed to be something like
“(3) (x)(y)(x=y→(Fx→Fy))” (pg. 293).

One could also write (3) not in second order logical notation as
(II) (F)(x)(y)(x=y→(Fx→Fy)),
which looks a lot like (I). [This alternative notation comes from Cartwright's footnote 3.]


But now one might pause, having a "third-man moment": can’t we also say something like
(III) (F)(x)(y)(x=y→[(P)((P(x,F)↔P(y,F))])
i.e. for every property, if two objects are identical than if one has it the other has it; or alternatively, any property x possesses is one y possesses when x=y, and neither x nor y has any other property?
Metalinguistically we could also point out that in
(IV) ∀α∀α'([α names x in Ln ∧ α names y' in Lm ∧ x=y]→∀β∀β'[(β and β' are expressions in Ln identical save for containing α in the one and α' in the other at the same places, respectively)→(β(α)≡β'(α')])
β(α) and β'(α') won’t be cognitively equivalent (≡cog) for all Ln speakers. This is failure of substitutivity.
(V) Suppose
i. δn(x*) is an expression (translation, interpretation) in the metalanguage Lm of βn(x) s.t. Tr(βn(x),δn(x)),
ii. β(x)∈〈γ1,…, γn〉= the set of all expressions containing x in Ln ordered and δ(x) a member of the companion ordering of a set of expressions {ε1,…,εm} in Lm, and
iii. Σ is an Lm speaker:
If (IV) then if Σ knows
∀β∀β'∀x∀y[Tr(β(α),δ(α*)) ∧ Tr(β'(α'),δ'(α'*)) ∧
(β(α)≡β'(α') ∨ δ(α*)≡δ'(α'*))]
then (≡cog(Σ,α,α') ∨ =cog(Σ,α*,α'*)

This implies also a mapping function from each βi to one and only one δi. Assuming nonambiguity. Call this our translation manual. …even though it is likely that (V) is false @.

Question: how to characterize “companion ordering”?
This is a serious problem in that, although we can characterize the metalinguistic cognitive equivalence principle (V) abstractly, we need a way to specify how it comes out that cardinality of Γ={γ1,…,γn} (n) and Ε={ε1,…,εm} (m) are the same (n=m), and that the relevant ordered multiples 〈γ1,…,γn〉,〈ε1,…, εm〉 come out with expressions of the same meaning (whatever the hell that is) for each pair (γk, εk) in any actual linguistic situation.

Or in other words, how do we know that Tr came out “right”?


But this is to return us to the problem of translation addressed by Quine, Davidson, et al. ad nauseam in the last century.
Suppose you did by hypothesis have an effective mapping function Tr. Then one could say Tr maps sets of utterances onto meanings. E.g. for Davidson this is truth-condition, for Quine a set of utterance occasions, for Frege it would be a Sinn. —But then suppose we give the indiscernability criterion within some language L, then we characterize Tl as a function that maps multiples of expressions within L onto "meanings." And taking it, as with φ,φ' above, that some of these expressions are otherwise identical except for terms appearing free at certain loci, one can say we use the related function Tt to map multiples of terms onto somethings (?!).

It is at this point that the discerning critic will notice how Cartwright's moves here are designed to trip this view up–at least to the extent that it needs to be modified in the face of obvious inadequacy to the task for which it is intended: to explain indiscernibility in terms of property-set coextensionality. I am not suggesting that any conclusions about haecceitism need be drawn from this sketch of a popular notion of indiscernibility.

However, with a view to a theory of identity for all and only indscernibles (that is, something is indiscernible from something if and only if they is identical), we ought to be suspicious of theores that can gnerate implications in only one direction. And I take it such an equivalence theory is useful because it subserves ordinary notions of identity without prima facie denying the possibility of numerically distinct identicals. One would do well to remember the original direction of Leibniz' formulation, and ponder what significance it has, both in his and our theories.