alaric 
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
Freedom is a very basic personal instinct. I think all creatures want to be free, free from fear and desire, free from hunger and pain. The protection of key personal freedoms has been central to the rise of civilisation, and this has continued in modern societies through activities like the abolition of slavery and the … Read more
new poems.. like new leaves on trees soon to be felled. the darkness the darkness.. what is the simplest path now? the straightest path leads into emptiness .. the vast gasp of new verbiage heaping onto blogs, spilling from pages into vacant minds, pictures pouring into eyes. the heart like a tickertape machine, printing painful … Read more
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
to practice meditation is to engage with a paradox for at its heart to meditate is to do nothing this nothing-doing is very difficult * meditation is sustained by an absence of effort such sustained effortlessness is exhausting a thousand teachings vacillate on this conundrum
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
i just ran a quick test and it came up with the following: Web Tool for Sequential Bayesian Decision Making Here’s what we have at this time: The table below displays the probabilities of the alternatives prior to the new observation(s). It also illustrates how the prior probabilities are combined with the conditional probabilities of … Read more
it’s ten years since i started this site. I’d made websites before, but ten years ago i started a poetry website, and then took it down and destroyed all the poems a few weeks later. Eventually I got it going again and tried a few concepts, uncompromising-poet.co.uk, accidentals.org, i-am-not-the-body.com and forkword.com before settling into what … Read more
I find it is impossible not to feel a huge sense of loss when seeing how fragmentary are the records of Aboriginal languages from South East Australia. Even today Aboriginal languages are still slipping away very rapidly. Why is this not seen as a cultural emergency? Why has the task always fallen on so few … Read more
Sadly, my long time collaborator Inchiki met his end over the Christmas period. We were on one of our walks when he had the accident. It was beside his favourite green pond, the one with the green rainbows, and he was looking in, reflecting on a reflection of the moon, feeling in his young sinews … Read more
I was reading Russell’s essay on scepticism recently, which was written in 1928 between the wars. He is fearful of the irrationality of the general populace – and quotes the following scene: “In 1919 I saw The Trojan Women acted at the Old Vic. There is an unbearably pathetic scene where Astyanax is put to … Read more