Categories
communication

Quicksilver Concepts

I appear to spend an inordinate amount of time peripatetically wandering around pondering wistful wisdoms, diverse philosophical insights and complex intuitions. Capturing or projecting mental insight and creative visualisation into written (or spoken) words is an exercise which loses a great deal in translation from the quicksilver or pure thought to the grammatical and semantic […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing

In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]

Categories
culture

UN Climate Action Summit

I was watching a live broadcast of a speech from the UN Climate Action Summit this morning. It was a great speech – very well written, articulate, intelligent, well-timed and well-delivered. For the particular political personality involved, this is undoubtedly a tour de force and, perhaps, a career-pinnacle of statesmanship and Global leadership. There is, […]

Categories
culture

Logical Games: Golf is not (just) Golf

One of the most unrelentingly tedious dimensions of human social existence is that of a polite and receptive silence in the presence of utterly uninteresting conversations or narrative recollections. Listening to an enthusiastic account of a round of golf, for instance – and acknowledging the diversity of personal interests, hobbies and sporting professions which exist […]

Categories
environment politics

Climate Strike: Which Economy?

I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]

Categories
culture

Bolivian Wildfires: Torching Ecological and Cultural History for Short-term Economic and Political Gain

Wildfires Are Destroying Bolivia’s Rock Art This represents an authentic cultural as much as an ecological catastrophe. History is characterised by the constructive, recombinatory sedimentation of complexity over time. It is a procedural thread that is also (and simultaneously) deeply infused with entropy, disorder and systemic disassembly. It is interesting to consider that while biological […]

Categories
culture

Biological Computation

Context: Workshop: Do living things compute? More fascinating collaboration from the Santa Fe Institute. In short and in gestalt: it all seems to invoke a form of computation that is neither particular or distributed but is both simultaneously; that is not finite or discrete in the sense of having easily-defined or simply-encapsulated boundaries; and it’s […]

Categories
Philosophy politics systems

Levelling-Up in the Civilisation Game

It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]

Categories
culture

Trapped

As you get older it seems that your options diminish, quite literally and as entropy takes hold the vast numbers of disordered states that you might end up in become less improbable, more certain. It is not so much a matter of age as it is of experience and an aggregate burden of negotiating the […]

Categories
money

The Challenge of Turning a Profit from Environmental Sustainability

If money is the problem, it is probably also the solution.

Categories
culture

Mind the Gap

Our systems of logistics and commuter transport derive the abstract, symbolic value and benefit of logical continuity from their function just as much as the commuters do.

Categories
communication

Information Entropy: Countering Propaganda

Falsity carries less information, less entropy and consequently travels more efficiently through a transmission medium.