The natural world around us is creative, complex, chaotic, dynamic and fundamentally self-organising. Any response to the world which hopes to successfully manage human beings and our many little worlds into anything resembling a sane organisational structure requires us to whole-heartedly embrace this complexity and chaos. Repetition and rote-learned, blindly regurgitative behaviours lead largely to […]
Category: culture
This is no great revelation: we are positively drowning in information. Awash in billions of words and sounds, squawks and squeaks, bits and bytes of marketing, ideas, symbols and ideology: we can all hear the information pandemonium in which we are embedded but we are switched (or switching) off to it. We can all hear […]
I remember a print hung on a wall in my father’s house when I was a child. I puzzled and fretted and stared and wondered about this image and it’s impossible, unsettling reality. The print was of M.C. Escher’s 1953 lithograph “Relativity” and I was probably only 9 or 10 years old at the time. […]
It occurs to me that the endemic iniquity of the global financial and economic system is not an outcome or a consequence of its function and activity. The positively obscene yawning chasm between the rich and poor is an essential precondition and sustaining feature of global economic mechanisms. Truly equitable wealth redistribution, social justice and […]
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Hate Speech: Caveat Emptor
Context: Hate on the Rise After Trump’s Election. It is no surprise, really, that hate crime has surged. As a far-flung observer of these events it has always been apparent (because it has always been the case) that politicians who do not cautiously vet their own words and public statements can let loose all manner […]
We have now graduated past “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” and have entered a “post-truth” world where any witless assertion whatsoever might be interpreted as defensible fact. There can surely now be no turning back. There can be no “peak post-truth” or “post-post-truth”. We appear to be inextricably trapped in an infinite […]
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Technosphere
It’s interesting to consider the collective, aggregated mass-density of all of our associated technological paraphernalia, our Technosphere. The aggregated totality of all our buildings, vehicles, dwellings, cities, the flotsam and jetsam of commerce and industry, our possessions and everything we throw away: it all has an estimated mass of 30 trillion tons. More information after […]
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Miami Beach: Lost Souls and Sandy Shoals
A very Cuban or otherwise South-American domain. It was summertime in the long stretch of Art Deco and sand-covered concrete, between the secure private condominiums and the cheap or garishly upmarket neon-lit beachside hotels and restaurants which gradually fade in a Westerly direction to apartments and strange villas housing mysterious perversions, under the sluggish feet […]
This film confirms a long-standing suspicion of mine that a “Cormac” is in fact the metric by which bleakness and the narrative representation of evil is measured. Cormac McCarthy’s script sparkles with philosophical rumination and psychological observation while weaving a tragic path through the world of drug-smuggling and its associated terrors. The film is finely […]
I wonder sometimes if all this digital media and virtual space we share is really something other than what it seems. We perceive a rich tapestry of choice and self-expression, a veritable cornucopia of tittilation, education and ideological assertion. It may actually be much simpler at base, that we are all following simple rules in […]
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The Perils of Paywalls
One of the most annoying things I have come across online is the tendency for some scientific and academic journals to percolate their content through paywalls. When this is done with journalistic news content, it is usually not difficult to find equivalent content freely available elsewhere. When this is done with academic reference or technical […]
Digital television was progressively rolled out over a period of several years. I find it ironic that although I now have several dozen channels to choose from I still remain fairly exclusively interested in the content of about four or five non-commercial channels. I find myself for the most part irritated, distracted and annoyed […]
Daedelus Kite 