my mind begins to hum...

mayavin · Post by **mayavin** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 10:27 pm

The ubiquity of power-law relations in physics is partly due to dimensional
constraints, while in complex systems, power laws are often thought to be
signatures of hierarchy or of specific stochastic processes.

mayavin · Post by **mayavin** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 11:02 pm

mayavin · Post by **mayavin** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 11:10 pm

The earliest way of writing qi consisted of three wavy lines, used to represent one's breath seen on a cold day.

mayavin · Post by **mayavin** » Fri Apr 02, 2010 11:31 pm

Critical educators have raised concerns that definitions and assessments
of student engagement are often exclusive to the values represented by
dominant groups within the learning environment where the analysis is
conducted.

H.G.Crosby · Post by **H.G.Crosby** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 6:56 am

Tous les jours Ã tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux.

H.G.Crosby · Post by **H.G.Crosby** » Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:06 am

black sun
Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall. This black sun was no invention of Harry's, but the alchemistÃs Sol niger, prime matter, the unconscious in its unworked, base state. The black sun is at its nadir, hidden, and all is night. In the Rig-Veda the sun during its night crossing is at its most magical and portentous. It must and shall be resurrected, as Harry knew he should persist again, in and like the sun, beyond his own sun-fall. Here again, paradox and ambiguity: the sun that gave sea, soil and life also stared down without pity at its creations and withered them, dried them out, burnt them. Or failed to shine, winking while life failed. Where the sun is, there also find the death principle, the chaos that reigned before light dispelled it, the chaos that Harry's life and work replicated in miniature. Harry Crosby, madman, failed poet, eventual suicide/homicide and wastrel,Crosby was one of those archetypical beings who existed almost to serve as a lynchpin...he knew the wealthy and the creative as one of them, yet existed on the boundaries of each of their worlds and sinking into one of his own creation, a delusional landscape of world sacrifice. I once opined that Harry Crosby was in fact the perfect real-life figure to star in a Lovecraftian short story...his dreams haunted with disturbing images, his days spent in a decadence born not of sloth but rather the destruction of his world as he had known it on the battlefields of WWI, his art as shunned in reality as Robert Upton Pickman's had been in Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model. They even existed as contemporaries to each other. It's interesting that a debauched minor relative of J.P. Morgan who died in 1929 should somehow stumble upon the same basic idea, couched in the same basic terms, as the Thule Geselleschaft formulated a world away in the last years of his life, and with no contact between them. The same basic idea, dressed up in borrowed Hindu and Tibetan clothes, that Himmler would later use as the foundation for his SS...and this despite the fact that Harry Crosby was the least racist man you could find. He hated no one especially, or more accurately stated, hated everyone equally. This was a man whose misanthropy knew no bounds. A survivor of the ambulance corps in WWI (along with Disney, Hemingway and e.e. cummings, as well as Lovecraft's creation Herbert West and neo-fascist Boy Scout apostate John Hargraves) Crosby wanted the whole mess to go up in a grand blaze of fire, an extraordinary burst of destructive force linked with the sun...prime matter, or primordial matter. Of course, one comes round to thinking of that ol' devil Lucifer again, the light-bringer prince of darkness who takes a lot of pleasure in shining just enough light to get us to stumble around in the dark, or for that matter Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, or if you're in a more teutonic mood you could go with Loki, the trickster who brings about Ragnarok with his subtle murder of his stepbrother Balder (and yes, he used blind Hod to deliver that lethal mistletoe...but does anyone think that Loki didn't see what was coming? For that matter, his later actions in making sure Balder stayed dead are suggestive here, aren't they...the true sun being slain and kept slain so that the dark light of Surtr could march forth from Muspelheim. It's almost as though a new god were born in the last century...a god of Fascism itself, a deity who loves science but hates knowledge, a creature of the new sun (if we're going to drag the Aztecs in, I suppose), the Black Sun. Neo-Nazi's and hardliners like Serrano and Devi (and someday, I promise I'll go more into detail about Savitri Devi, who loved India and the ancient vedic texts so much that she became an ardent Nazi, theorizing that Hitler was Kalki...a dangerous mix, lucidity and insanity, and worthy of its own entry) to this day sit around and tell tales of Himmler's expeditions to Tibet (where he supposedly met the Agarthans and learned secrets of genetic engineering...and don't bother trying to explain that Himmler never went to Tibet, he just sent expeditions, because it doesn't matter to the mythology of the Black Sun) Did a drunk who would take his own life somehow forsee the rise of this being? Did the shock to the system of WWI (and the Spanish Influenza that followed) combine with the lightning war of Hitler's Germany and the splitting of the atom (and really, can you get any more prime in your matter?) to help midwife in a deity of hate? Words mean more than just their concrete, obvious definitions. The 20th Century saw rise of the totalitarian state, more authoratarian and autarchic than any state in the history of mankind, even than the dictatorships of Ancient Rome or any monarchy. Did totalitarianism bring with it new beings, born out of those changes in the brain Crosby spoke of? I look at my world, where people consider airliners filled with people to be just big bombs, where people who think cows are sacred are lied to so that they will eat potato strips cooked in cow tallow, where my nation often seems drunk on power and willing to unleash armies without regard for the nation's will or the desireability of another conflict, where everyone's information is being constantly used to sell and monitor and the Attorney General recruits spies from among the citizenry and threatens to build camps to hold any dissenters in, where we are told what to watch, when and how we can watch it, how we can record or store it and in what devices, where people decry and plot against one another based on trifles like race or suppositions about the unknown and unknowable and even kill each other over these things, as if death were not inevitable but must be shepherded along...I look at my world, and I wonder if the Black Sun is already here. Hopefully, if it is, we still have time. After all, gods die. Often at the hands of men.