i am all about massaging egos, so i suppose the concept of self reference appeals to me naturally. Descartes said “Cogito ergo sum” – “I think therefore I am”, which is a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. Douglas Hofstadter’s works on...
if logic ate its tail, ala the serpent Ouroboros, through self referential recurrence, then perhaps we could get beyond it through mathematical sleigh of hand. Archiles approaches the tortise but they never meet up; tristram shandy never writes about the moment...
Bit of a wander through nostalgia.. here are some images which capture the ’16 bit’ decade for me. The timespan i am thinking of is about 1989-1998, when i first got my teenage hands on computers and was instantly transfixed by...
Readings about Corso et. al. lead me to discover Harold Chapman’s photos of the Beat Hotel. Shame they are all locked up behind a paywall, I wish they could escape and fertilise the minds of artist poet shamans everywhere. I would...
I often find myself speaking enthusiastically about Open Democracy to someone online or in person, only to discover that their attention seems to be focused on a little fleck of foam on my lip. At least, it seems as if that...
It occurs to me that the question ‘why do i feel?’ is answered through an exploration of that feeling, through an indulgence in the substrate of that question. To unrestrainedly debauch oneself in abeyance to the ultimate ‘why?’ is the path...
I think there are only two religions left in the world today, they are STEM and HASS. These are acronyms borrowed from university speak – STEM stands for Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics; HASS is Humanities Arts & Social Sciences, and...
I recently read about an interesting study that found that removing mistletoes from eucalyptus trees actually caused biodiversity to further deteriorate, particularly in the number of insect eating bird species present in the forest. Mistletoe is often considered a sort of...
Reading an article in the Economist, about more work done on the fermi paradox (that the galaxy should be teeming with civilisations so why isn’t it), and i got musing again about interstellar travel. If we view the galaxy as being...
Attended a really interesting talk last week, the ANU’s Jager Hales lecture which this year was given by Professor Edouard Bard (Collège de France & CEREGE Univ. Aix-Marseille, France) about the end of the last ice age, where from about 18,000...
Having a coffee before my first Earth sciences lecture, I watch some workman cutting up bike racks with a battery powered angle grinder and hacksaw. The sulphry burnt smell of the blade cutting through steel reminds me of dad’s workshop and...
