The Angel of History: walking backwards into a digital mental health future by Mark Brown
Living a life with mental health difficulty can rob us of our sense of the future; reduce us to living from moment to agonising moment. The debate about technology and mental health often focuses on what might be lost rather than what might find. When...
Motivating people is very simple, and its surprising how most people can fail to understand its most basic concept.... Everyone acts toward their own goals, whatever those may be, some weighted more important than others. They act toward nothing else. Their goals may include good things for others or that others also accomplish their own goals in...
I wrote this post December 2008 but didn't publicly post it here. I don't why, other than I hate facebook, I was ranting and thought I'll keep it to myself.
But, appearing in this past year (2009), there are already solutions to what I see as new emerging problems with the internet and usage being confined to pre-designed and pre-determined...
I'm not sure how to prove it, but I think that to solve this reliably is an NP-Complete problem and practically is useful for new kinds of routing protocols and a foundation for decentralized global democracy more similar to how Wikipedia allows billions of people to agree on many things instead of top down ways of organizing things.
How can a...
I think I am thinking about thinking, but when I try to write it in math it doesn't think about its own thinking. Intelligence is deeply self referencing, a hall of mirrors so bizarre you can't tell if you're a reflection or the real thing. We live in darkness, delusional enough to think the electricity patterns crossing our skull are the objects...
Do some research starting at places like and calculate and prove to scientific peer reviewed standards, how much does it cost to save the cheapest Human life? That number of dollars we should call HUMANLIVES. It fluctuates like a stock price. It increases when more is given to efficient charities, since the cheapest Human lives to save are saved...
“I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what...
from neurons to self
by Rodolfo R. Llinas
This essay arose out of a set of talks given at The University of St. Andrews
in Scotland, where Professor Glen Cottrell had graciously invited
me to give the American Alumni Lectures in 1989. Little did I know then
that St. Andrews would be back in my life, when, in 1998, my son...
Something from the Past-Future-Present.
"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my...
Smarter animals recognize themself in a mirror. Others see their reflection and act like its another animal. They hide their food, get ready for a fight, or run away for example.
Monkeys are smart enough to act based on where others are looking. They value 1 of 2 boxes higher if a person appears to value it, and more often choose to open that...
September through December 2010 was my first semester of education since I left high school in 2007. In one of my courses, Contemporary Issues, I wrote a paper (a very short one) entitled "Why Computers Do Not," which was meant as a counter to the hopelessly superior article by Marvin Minsky of MIT "Why People Think Computers...
In this book, I discovered one of the most inspiring (fore)words in the area of BRAIN SCIENCE that swiftly explain consciousness as if it never represented much of a problem. I am sure you will enjoy.
"Modeling Phase Transitions in the Brain"
Editors: D. Alistair Steyn-Ross · Moira Steyn-Ross
Early in the 19th century debates on...
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. --Albert Einstein
E usually does not equal M C^2. Thats only when its not moving.
The USA government learned that terrorists keep more secrets and try to have more privacy than people who are not terrorists. Therefore secrets and privacy are bad, so the USA government proceeded to build...
Sensation and Forces
"Not to reproduce what we can already see, but to make visible what we cannot" (Paul Klee)
The task of art, in all its forms, is to capture forces. Deleuze and Guattari say that this, ultimately, is what makes art abstract - the "summoning" and making visible of otherwise imperceptible forces (Deleuze...
The Elements and Movements in Bacon's Paintings
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions" (Sir Francis Bacon)
Deleuze distinguishes 3 pictorial elements in Bacon's paintings, which together constitute a highly precise system - the field that is the spatializing material structure, the...
Painting, Its Ways and Faces
"The adventure of painting is that it is the eye alone that can attend to material existence or material presence [...]" (39).
Deleuze relates to two definitions of painting - one by line and color, which is visual, and the other by trait and color-patch, which is manual. He then proceeds to...