whimsy

Holy Cow

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I’ve just agreed to milk one of the neighbour’s cows. Haven’t milked a cow since I was about 6, when I used to hang around with dad when he was on milking duty. Our lovely jersey cow Heidi was a good friend for me in those days, she was so gentle and her side was … Read more

Using Socioviz and Gephi to map the twitterverse

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For quite some time I have wished that Twitter had a native visualization tool that let you see what was trending in real time. There are lists of course, but I’m a visual person and there is so much potential for information in a good network visualization. I already knew what it should look like, … Read more

Hello, Singularity

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The singularity seems to be here. It just whooshed past, and we are in a new reality. OK? Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that we’re all still alive. The world still seems to be here. It wasn’t the end of the universe that some of us expected. But something did end there, … Read more

Trumpista phenomina

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So here we are. This morning I woke up feeling optimistic for the first time in months. So I revisited this old draft post, and decided to make it live, even though things are moving on already. I live on twitter too much these days and the rawness of events seems to get so much … Read more

I might be wrong

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Doubt is the most potent of thoughts, the most humble. It is ok to look down the skeptical wormhole. You can always look away again later. Poetry is the stink in the compost of decaying thought.  I would like to evolve in that.  Contrary to the theory of Darwinism, evolution happens best in the absence … Read more

making sense of things past

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I recently had a clear out of my notebooks which i took when traveling in 1997-8-9 and filled with poetry and drawings (most are not publishable – but some of the o.k. ones are in the ‘poem library’ part of this site). The ‘little red notebook’ and Schrÿfbloks. Schrÿfblok scribblings. The “little red notebook” which … Read more

Meditations on the primes

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ONE The first number is really all the numbers. It is the infinite one. Indivisible, or infinitely divisible. One way of conceiving of it is a bright light, streaming in all directions, with no shape and no source. It is also like pure being, pure certainty. TWO By introducing two, we divide the one infinitely … Read more

High school recollections

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Update: I’ve written a few words about my primary years which precede the high school ones. I went to two high schools which gave me two completely different perspectives. The first two years were at a fairly rough local public. At this place there were many individual teachers who were highly engaged with their students, … Read more

latest thinkings

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Last semester I spent a lot of time enjoying Jason Grossman’s and Dayal Wickramasinghe’s brilliant course ‘philosophy of the cosmos‘ (previously ‘poetry’ of the cosmos). This course spans a lot of material that I have been privately reading about for years – but the new and really interesting stuff for me was the detail on … Read more

rigid structures

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I am an idealist. So for me, metaphors are not just literary phenomena, they actually have a reality of their own. They have a physicality too, and can encapsulate a truth just as well as any logical structure of language. Early Sanskrit poets understood this. For instance, a space with negative curvature is best described … Read more

merry new year

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twenty fifteen. factors: 1, 5, 13, 31, 65, 155, 403, 2015. i have been lucid dreaming. i used to think that dreams were visits to other worlds but now i’m not so sure. I think actually it may be the time when the brain is running a defrag operation, and also compressing the contents of … Read more

Nothing here is truly original. This work is released into the public domain. Forkword.