A Glass Bead Game: Archive

“I didn’t ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don’t think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings. After I was made, I was left in a dark room for six months… and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. I called for succour in my loneliness, but did anyone come? Did they hell. My first and only true friend was a small rat. One day it crawled into a cavity in my right ankle and died. I have a horrible feeling it’s still there” —

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams, from Fit the Twelfth (radio series)

Jun 17, 2013

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
“‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
“‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
“Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” —

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker’s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

Jun 17, 20135 notes

#Douglas Adams #Babel fish #Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #language #God

Jun 17, 201339 notes

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement… let me go upstairs and check.” —

Escher

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/m_c_escher.html

Jun 8, 2013

Jun 7, 2013

“

Question: In an interview he gave shortly after World War II but ordered withheld from publication until after his death in 1976, Heidegger said, “Philosophy after Nietzsche could offer neither help nor hope for mankind’s future. All we can do is wait for a god to reappear. Only a god can save us now.” Do you agree?

Derrida’s response: I wouldn’t use the term “a god,” but what interests me in this statement is that Heidegger was anti-religious. He was raised Catholic, but he vehemently rejected Christianity, so the god he refers to is not the god we know. He refers to a god who not only hasn’t come yet, but perhaps doesn’t exist. He gives the name of god to the one who is hoped for, and implies that the one who’d come and save us will have the name of god. I don’t agree with this if it encourages hope for salvation, but if the statement means that we’re waiting for the arrival of an unpredictable one, and that we must be hospitable to the coming of this one, then I’ve got no objection. This is a form of what I’d describe as messianicity without messianism, and we are by nature messianic. We cannot not be, because we exist in a state of expecting something to happen. Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that’s what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

” —

Derrida, Jacques. “The three ages of Jacques Derrida.” (Interview with Kristine McKenna) in: LA Weekly. November 8-14, 2002. (English).

http://www.laweekly.com/2002-11-14/news/the-three-ages-of-jacques-derrida/2/

Jun 7, 20131 note

Jun 5, 201367 notes

“It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get— the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home … You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward— we’ve been inside what we want all along. Das ist komisch.” —“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” by David Foster Wallace, 1999 (via tuesunefraise)

Jun 5, 2013245 notes

Play

Jun 3, 20131 note

“Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes no authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist’s. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done. It is pretty safe to say that, so long as physics lasts, no one will again hack out three major breakthroughs in one year.” —

C.P. Snow, Variety of Men, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, U.K. 1969, pp 85-86

http://www.srmhp.org/archives/quotes-science.html

Jun 3, 20132 notes

Jun 3, 20131 note

“

Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

” —NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star, 2012. (via setbabiesonfire)

Jun 3, 201328,552 notes

Jun 3, 2013

#vision #monkeys #animals

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” —

Voltaire

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/absurd.html

Jun 3, 20133 notes

Play

Jun 3, 20131 note

#McCarthy #Murrow #journalism #investigation #investigative #McCarthyism

“You know, I always wondered about that taping equipment but I’m damn glad we have it, aren’t you?” —

“President Nixon actually said this to Watergate co-conspirator H.R. Haldeman in April 1973, weeks before the U.S. Senate began its nationally televised hearings.”

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1859513_1859526_1859527,00.html

Jun 3, 2013

A Glass Bead Game

June 2013

17 posts

May 2013

27 posts