Twisted - Art, Schizophrenia & Drugs

This is a portrayal of schizophrenic degradation over a period of years by a patient drawing cats; I think in the late 1920's. I don't want to get into the why a lot of mental disease is exacerbated by 20th century problem/pill solutions but I think it's a useful benchmark for codifying drifting reality.

I quite like the fire god pussy at the end. Frankly it looks splendid and if that's what cats look like, then I want some of that. Well, rather that, than the cheeky catwalk turn and that exposed-in-my face feline arsehole they serve up currently.

And so I also want to introduce to you something I came across from my subscription to dope nation the other day that I've been holding back for you while I get over  Wittgenstein's mesmerizing come down. Truly he is the peak.

In a way it's good coincidence, as I specifically want to talk about the effects of morphine because when I've been screaming so loud at an entire hospital complex, to put me out my pain that they've jacked me up on 200mg of Pethadine AND 200 mg of morphine (eight times the hourly dose they prefer to administer) that it's only when I saw this picture that I realised what went on through the blinding pain. 

That actually, even though it's the most cathartic transfer of schmerz to no pain in my life, I previously had no idea that beneath the sea of doped up tranquility, that what was really going on in the hospital bed festooned with pipes and wires and drips and gastric pipes up my nose was a lotta lotta sedated neurological activity.

OF COURSE NOW I SEE. The mind was merely being deceived. And I think you can see that in these pictures below which frankly are the most dangerous artistic and neurological experiment I have come across to date that the morphine tricked me into thinking the pain had gone away. Here is a portrait that portrays otherwise.

And so I claim that the Psilocybin (magic mushroom) below, is ostensibly cheekier, funnier, more dramatic and a little bit bucking bizarre. But as I've done both I'm allowed to shoot my mouth off about that. 

There's a lot more of the artist Bryan Lewis Saunders doing drugs for us all; that is him, you and I over here. 

Update: I can't find the exact post but Clif High talked about using snow to diminish burnt toes and the pain duration lasting infinitely longer than just dealing with it sans snow.

Put The Kettle On

Lovely. Via Rob

Ctrl Alt Del - Wittgenstein

I've been telling people for a couple of years that my attention is shredded. Back in 2006 Google released a cloud based RSS reader and my datastream which was heavy anyway went up by let's say, around 10 times as much in volume. To compensate for this I naturally read faster, ditched stuff quicker, learned to scan read and get to the point where I can pick out the interesting sentences, the bits that fire off more endorphins with 2 or 3 screen swipes by my eyeballs per page scroll.

I don't advocate becoming so data intensive as there's always a quid pro quo and what I made up for in breadth was mugged by the reality of depth, though the complex caveat of that is I also covered a lot more breadth-of-depth. 

So that's all clear then isn't it? 

No? Whatever. It's complex but the road traffic accident victim (did you see this yesterday on Vimeo?) was my attention span for traditional deep reading. A sort of brain death if you can make it to the end of that video.

I used to inhale literature and then that waned to non fiction with post WWII U.S politics and then that distilled to just pure digital fact hunting; scanning at the speed of light ( though with admittedly low clock cycle CNS CPU) on the internet and suddenly I started to fail at reading books I'd have stuck it out with before. 

I failed on War on Peace and succeeded with Hamas. I stumbled on Don Quixote and lucked out on good manners, I tired over and over again with Moby Dick but uncovered it's roots in all three Abrahamic religions (it takes a wilful effort of dismissing the obvious on that point as I learned recently from experience. It will probably only linger for a few seconds at most, or if you're lucky you'll figure out why all three religions tell variations on the same stories). 

The list goes on and on, choose a topic, put my name next to it and see what the Google turns up. I've written more bollocks on other people's blogs than I have on my own and that's saying something.

But it's consistent bollocks. I know this even though I'm completely inconsistent in real life because when I comment it's coming from my heart and I get a chance to discretely retract a few unchoice words unlike in real life, like yesterday when I wanted to delete my mouth when I realised the business card I requested at the Emporiums "It's happened to be a closet" (sic) was denied because the poor girl thought I was asking for her personal business card. And so when I secured it off someone more senior I lost my temper...only to regret my aggression that pointedly articulated 'of course there's a business card for the establishment' in a voice a little louder than a gentleman uses. I wish I could have deleted the tonality of my words. They were bullying and unfair.

So no books of importance for so long. Well of course I still read, but most books look like shitty shinola compared to the outstanding contexutality and accessibility of the webz. 

But how adorable is analogue paper? It's a real chick puller these days to carry a book. Sometimes I take a walk with one just to look the part against you arseholes with your noses stroking your iPads and  your greasy fingers in your iPhones. Books are very sexy. They always will be and let's face it; tech just hit a design wall. Rectangles are the new black till we figure out 3D multi-colour morphing fractals and shape shifting tech devices. And then who knows? We might even be able to burp it up as language as well. True Visual language.

A little bit like this early monochromatic attempt:

And then out of nowhere. Like a bat out of fucking Honda....

....I was off the grid for a few days and rereading some of Taleb's Black Swan in between emailing him, as he's a bit of a gent in real life unlike his haughty character that comes leaping of the page. 


Then I hit solid fucking Gold. I pulled out my Ray Monk's Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius and inhaled 600 pages in three sittings. I could FEEL my brain saying. "YES MY SON"..."You're still tasty" "Dammit you're so fucking hot" "This is FUN". "You are SO back". 


This is where it all started. Reading books. God I had such an amazing time those three days of utter undisturbed silence.


So much so that when I leaned back after the final page and realised the scope of Ludwig's attempt to reconcile his intellect with his life (a failure that he would be first to admit), as I pondered the maths and the logic needed to define it all as the illusion it really is. The abstraction and sheer effort required to line up all the ducks in one go and press a big banging button. I shed tears for the sacrifice involved in the venture we call history. I didn't undertand it all of course, many times I could only smell the scent of the effort around the edges. 


It was best described a few months ago in that video where the voice says: Nobody knows what the universe is for, but all agree that it is extremely expensive. 


I hope those cocks at CERN know EXACTLY what they are doing as they tamper with space and time.That they aren't taking risks without OUR permission or consultation. It's us who pay the price for science. NOT the team players on the Manhattan Project who all wrung their hands  in post war angst at the enormity of what they unleashed on the world.

So yeah. I nailed a book I'd loved once in the past and actually it sent me spiralling into space at times as I realised the conversion of Vicky (as he was privately known in one Swansea household) from that which can be articulated to that which merely exists. The word to the verb. The idea to the act. The doing of it all...the doing.


Thank you Ray Monk for bringing one of the most complex people alive. A man whose presence scared his closest friends into moderating how much time they could tolerate with his intellectual fierceness. Russell, Keynes, GE Moore. He broke all their backs and yet, was it really Feyerabend who finally had the courage to challenge him in a way that he appreciated. The same Feyerabend who briefly taught McKenna at Berkeley? Small world baby. Small fucking world.

I'll leave you with Wittgenstein on Science and to which I direct the researchers at CERN to consult the rest of the monkeys on the planet, if a hint of risk is present. You don't know  ANY more than we do. You're just monkeys in cotton underpants tinkering with dark matter.


Wittgenstein:

'The truly apocalyptic view of the world' he wrote, 'is that things do not repeat themselves.' 

that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves, that things do not repeat themselves.......

Quantum Entanglement

When is empirical science going to wake up from it's measurable stupor to grasp the obtuseness of subject object delineation. That empirical science is intellectually asphyxiated. That dare we utter it.... all is indeed one and thus the end and the beginning are contiguous. 

That the temporal experience we enjoy as monkeys sitting around the planet, in our cotton underpants, arguing over who owns what, is an extraordinarily unique blessing not to be wasted.

We're making daily headway into the nature of our unique space time dimension. We haven't even scratched the surface.

Some deviant arsehole wrote that in the comments of the Quantum Entanglement article over on Wired. Anybody notice Graham Hancocks new book (his first work of fiction) is called Entangled? The word is popping up everywhere for me.


Update comment from a very knowledgable person:



When these scientists learn that there are seven dimensions that precede space-time, and time is the eighth dimension, then the source of entanglement occurs in the realm of rules, data, and patterns before ever projecting into space-time. Thereby, what is entangled are the patterns in those seven hidden dimensions that give rise to the "things" within space-time. Consequently, all entanglement by its very nature stretches through time before manifesting in space. Thereby, the definition of entanglement must include time for the concept to be accurate.


Just like an object-oriented programming language reuses code and objects, the universe reuses patterns within those seven dimensions. Learn to manipulate those patterns and you can cause effects anywhere in space-time, at will. The downside is that the consequences for error are far greater and idiot-humans would merely destroy themselves before having the chance to understand what went wrong.


Clean up your acts, and I'll teach you more. Try to use this now and you won't ever get the chance.


Here is Wisdom...

Rural Telecom - India

View more presentations from Futurescape.

My friend Syamant has written a nice ready reckoner on the India rural telecoms landscape. A part of the world that culturally and geographically I'm fascinated by primarily because there's so much unspoiled strangeness and mysticism (unlike China's uber-rational homogeneity) which I think makes for a fascinating ethnographic topography as it collides with the 21st century. 

There are many who bemoan India's irrational  contradictions and yet deep down I view those same frustrations as a much more meaningful organic flowering of humanity for the future. 


I've no evidence for this and I also am probably guilty of varnishing some tough realities such as poverty and health indices with some sort of Caucasion cultural posturing though I mean it with the best of intent.

Andrew Hurd - Bangkok

The last time Andrew Hurd made a claim about me I asked to meet him and he bottled out even though he claimed in his Twitter profile to be a truth seeker (oh dear). 

So once again Andrew. I challenge you to a public recorded debate on the 9/11 commission findings. 

Let's do this. It'll be a pleasure for me. 

Heart 2 Heart

Via Brain Pickings

Birkenstock

Our long international nightmare is over. Rob is back in Birkenstocks.

The Military Industrial Complex

Is an absolute sweetie sometimes. There are simply no absolutes are there?

Werner Herzog's - Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I'd love to see this 3D documentary by Werner Herzong. Coincidentally, I've been spending a bit of time  over the last few weeks listening to descriptions of the caves in Lascaux in Southern France where Picasso emerged and said 'we've learned nothing' after seeing the intense visionary drawings which in this instance also adorn the caves at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. However both locations (and others) liberally portray therianthropes for no explicable rational reason.

Anybody else learned of the similarities between these caves and the features of cathedrals such as Chartres? 

Rak Razam interviews Dan Schreiber

I'd not heard of either of these gentlemen till yesterday but the podcast interview was for me (three times now) a delight to listen to as it's chock full of modestly articulated but  fabulously mystical dialogue. 

Gentle, considerate, unhurried. 

The kind of interview you simply never heard before the internet came along. A credit to both of them and for me the extra bonus of a couple of very nice ideas that articulated answers to questions I have about consciousness and emergence. I now aim to make the Gold Coast in Australia my first port of call. That's Melbourne and Sydney that just slipped to second and third place on a podcast.

Hey Jude

Ramones versus Misfits

Even critics who initially perceived the Ramones as a studied parody of a rock and roll band began to complain that the joke was wearing thin - What goes around comes around.


The documentary is excellent.

Infographic Of The Day

No China! More stats over at The Economist who still haven't done an online Big Mac Index (wasted brand equity sitting there gathering digital dust).

Mindfulness by John Kabat-Zinn

It's a little bit odd that Google (or God as somebody called it the other day given how many requests we make) is responsible for me actually making a little time to see what meditation is all about. I don't remember how this tipped up on my screen but the reality is that John Kabatt-Zinn is like a black belt meditation zen master or something and paid by Google for this session which is about as simple as it gets with a few thoughtful comments. Who knows you might find someone you don't recognise or even better forget someone you know quite well. I think most importantly is timing for this so if it isn't the right time then you know where to find it in the future (or not).


Correction: He implies he isn't getting paid in this. He's still like the Ultra fight Club champ of meditation. Soothing voice.

Must Affect The Brain In Some Way.

Classic. I remember the first time Michelle in the office near Bournemouth where we worked gave me an acid music cassette and I played it in my car for a few weeks on the daily drive on the M27 from Southampton. It was like nothing I'd ever heard and my brother thought it was his sanity he'd lost when I woke him up from a nap by playing it at home. I still like acid loops and riffs in music as it's a distinctive sound but I've moved on to the jazz of electronica otherwise known as minimal tech. Probably boring to most and so now I listen to the youngster rave on about dub and it's not the same is it? OK just kidding.

Via Richard Buchanan (I've forgotten your twitter account you use it so seldom)

McKenna On The Money #1

It seems like most of McKenna's stuff is turning up on Youtube these days as I just completed a marathon 62 item playlist set from one of his workshops recently. It's an awkward way to listen to a long long podcast but there are so many gems in there its worth the effort.

I intend to try and make clips of some of the shorter and more interesting soundbites that are more in the way of cultural observations as a 'gateway drug' to his longer sets like the one above which is touching, as I think it was organised by the Mathematician and friend Ralph Abraham at Berkeley where McKenna left his studies early in the late 60's and if I'm not mistaken Ralph still lectured. (Incidentally Ralph appears in the Spirit Molecule documentary too)

McKenna is unsurpassed when up against a home crowd of entheogen aficionados but here he wasn't always so sure of the crowd temperature and is thus slightly more cautious than usual though still connecting warmly with the mainly campus crowd. The full set is called Taxonomy of Illusion on Youtube.

Gravity

The Mushrooming Science

Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs. He is also currently a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization. The most interesting find (and not unusual for anyone studying entheogens) is that the Psilocybin mushroom is measurably more real than the reality you are experiencing while reading this. 


Additionally according to the scientific results, it is also in the top five experiences ever; such as child birth, marriage and other spiritually moving and deeply human experiences in life.


What's the point? Well as Joe Rogan pointed out in a video I saw earlier. It's not very good for capitalism and the military industrial complex. 


Weird how top down hierarchical religion and government deemed it illegal and immoral.


I just can't figure it out. Can you?

Thailand's Tropical Gulag

The troubles down south have been going on a lot longer than the reductionist story of Reds versus Yellows. It's straight forward ignorance, chauvinism and arrogance coupled with territorial insensitivity and inflexibility to subsidiarity, that only exists due to the geographical and historical idiocy of the British empire in that part of the world . 

I used to occasionally cross the border at Narathiwat though that is no longer sensible given the violence that takes place in that part of the world. It's evident to me that the muslims down South or rather less materialistic cultures are de facto materially/fiat currency poorer in the the 21st century than materialist cultures that value stuff over non stuff. 

Things like feelings and consciousness for example. We should be aware of that when assessing a balance sheet for the superiority of cultures. Once again Al Jazeera does more serious and more pertinent content than any other global news organization.

Brands & Social Media

Doug Rushkoff (who put me on to Terence McKenna) thinks he may have gone over the top on this talk but I think it's smart and cogent. I would have liked to embed this in my page here but the organisers of the branding conference don't quite get the mechanics of what makes a brand in the 21st century. It's about a half hour and is a must see video.

Quora Versus Yahoo

Via Jay Dolen

American Twitter: Who & How

Via We are Social

Is Science Predicated On Woo Woo?

Behaviour Change

As much as for me as for anybody. Via Mike

Terence & Typography

Lazyscope

It all very much depends on how you use Twitter and drilling that thought down a bit further; what types of user experience you either have or wish to have. For example sometimes I like to have Twitter alerts on while I'm watching a movie or other times I want a really low level intrusion experience. Lazyscope is a bit different because if you're in content reviewing mode i.e. Interested in taking a better look at the content being linked to in tweets without opening up a new tab or browser, then it's a great tool and one I like to use when the intensity of Tweetdeck is too much for getting on with other tasks. You can add RSS and Google reader's feeds to it as well as some other stuff if that sounds interesting.

War Porn - Festival of Dangerous Ideas

I was all prepared to criticize P.W. Singer in this talk, properly entitled Wired for War at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. He's too young to work at a think tank, he must be immoral for working at the Pentagon, he's too tall and so on and so forth but in conclusion it's a useful exploration of technology acceleration in war though it really is depressing to hear a well framed adumbration of war technology squared when the reality of an ecologically strip mined planet with obesity and hunger as the definitive wellbeing paradigm is where the good brains should really be put to work.

Update: Original video censored or deleted. Replacement is a similar presentation.

Myth Matters

Brilliant story telling from around the world that is echoed time and again through the lens of fractal and recursive geometric patterns illuminated by Joseph Campbell. I love the way he talks about the need for fresh metaphors to illuminate ancient religions including his advocacy of Star Wars to that end.

RGB

Two completely different directions but this and the last post are both executions I really like, though that doesn't mean I think they are effective. Liking something is a little too subjective from a planning perspective as I may be projecting my bias against cars and thus for environmentally responsible motoring, though that too is up for debate given the manufacturing footprint both of these may or may not require. Like I said, I just like the work. I'm feeling too lazy to figure out if they would actually work.

This execution via AJ

a priori language?

A priori language via Gemma

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

Feels like Google's hire of Matias Duarte from Palm to Android was a good move. I'm certainly feeling better about Android over Apple after this interview at CES, which gets into the 'to and fro' of designing for people as well as open source developers (though of course the latter are people too).

Entheogen

This documentary on Entheogens is quite uplifting. I recommend bookmarking it for one of those times when being cheered up isn't going to work or help, but taking your mind off things will or if you just want to skip to the Stanford and MIT geek-mafia talking about the inseparable relationship of computing and LSD when pitching the hippies against the pocket protector brigade for creative output (no contest). It's at 50 minutes 30 seconds. 


In case you know of any good documentaries, talks and so forth, I'm in the process of hoovering up as much of the internet's video content on quantum mechanics, relativity, entropy, and of course big bucking bang as well as mysticism including all the deisms. so please do let me know of any gems.

The Internet's Mid-Life Crisis

Tim Wu is the guy who coined the phrase net neutrality. I've blogged about him before as his grasp of the internet, media and commerce is well thought out, as exemplified by his ability to identify and reconcile the dangers of corporate narrow interests along with the need for Stalinist self interest in the face of egregious competition. Uncomfortable business thinking indeed.

In this video he elegantly entangles the dynamics of censorship, vertical integration, technology suppression and the emergence of Apple as a record label/TV Station or even old school film studio. He makes great use of historical but little known precedents to support his claims.

Steve Fuller

I rate Steve Fuller in this. He has  dazzling verbiage skills  and at least talks from his heart though I still say he's unwilling to pay homage to the nicompoop(s) deer-in-the-headlights reverence on the right. 

Anybody else feel that way or is it a bit too boring and grown up?

Update: I got Steve Buller mixed up with Simon Conway when originally posting this so I've amended the title and post. Sorry about that.

Dark Matter

One

This is the best I've seen yet (you generally know something is good on Youtube if it's under 50000 views and preferably under 5000). Sean Carroll is brilliantly lucid and engaging in this presentation.

Intel

Cocks (Look Mum This Colour's Perfect)

There's always Charlie Brookers 10 Biggest cocks (and she-cocks) in advertising if you wish to pursue the theme.

Oh go on. Do some more.

Less Is More

Junk Science?

This dramatic European Space Agency image shows all the satellites and human-made debris now orbiting space. What are your views? From the Holistic Quantum Relativity Initiative.

Minimalism

Less is more (over here)

London Adland

Via iboy

Is This The Voice Of Consumerism?

Asymmetric Follow

Twitter is a hyper contextual communicaton tool.

The number of different types of user experience is infinite (a big claim that I am prepared to stand by)

This means for example that the user experience of a person with 100 followers is not the same as 200 followers.

The next obvious context is the users preference for follow-back which is in itself a ratio.

Then there is the intent or purpose of use. Al Jazeera, Financial Times, BBC Podcasts are all monologue, but there are also power users that choose to mainly hold a monologue.

Which leads to the content of the 140 character limit. That in itself is almost impossible to describe.

So while this is a terrific post about the asymmetrical twitter experience the point is, that how people experience the service is really up to them. So get stuck in and define how you like to use it. It’s a remarkable evolutionary development in human communication on a par with the telegraph wire.

More over here

Evolvify

Sure. He's a human and takes a shit like all of us on this painfully extraordinary planet but equally it's hilarious listening to Sam Harris trip over his snooty superiority and resort to ad homs on non locality plus I can't ignore that funniest for me so far (and thank you so much for putting this my way) is Michael Shermer answering the question of whether it's him or his x squllion neurons firing off when he's thinking and he replies it's his neurons. 

Chopra calls him a Zombie. The Scientist snookered on logic and the mystic hurling epithets? This is what Youtube was made for. 

Maddeningly frustrating is the inability not to join in and take both sides on as I have my own point of view which is deeper and darker heresy ;)

More over here

Aflockalypse

More Karmageddon over here.

7 Billion Reasons 2 Think Twice

Swift

I Hated You, I Loved You Too.

Written at the age of 18 years old and performed here at the age of 19. It's a remarkable song if only for the way Kate Bush squeezes the lyrics and syntax to achieve something different for "so cold, let me in your window" with emphasis on the second syllable of the last word not the first syllable as would be expected. 

As soon as I understood what she did just now here, I realised it was as pure as art gets in a singer, song writing (not forgetting interperative dance) and then I thought of the parallels (lines) with Debbie Harry's lyrical contortions and Mezzo Soprano vocal transitions in Heart of Glass that made the song worth posting too. They both sing of the love/hate dynamic often found between lovers, which I have to say I'm not a fan of in real life, but recognise as productive and useful in many relationships I've observed.

Whatever you think of these two songs I've yet to hear someone sing them so that they are indistinguishable from the original. If you do let me know.

MyCrAsian (Crazy + Asian) Mother

Consistently brilliant. Human, Insightful. More over here.