A cross over of a different kind with this humorous pic of me and my bestest most dreadlocked friend, Jen. It’s taken from Jen’s online photogallery at iwokeupdeadtoday.com.
I’ve had lots of questions from keen followers of Ordo Ab Chao about the wonderful R. I can confirm she does exist, is very photogenic and I’ll put up a shot of us as soon as I can. 😀
Recently R has been reading one of my favourite books, Milan Kundera’s (pictured) Unbearable Lightness of Being
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nietzsche’s eternal return. Most particularly just how fanciful an idea it is and whether the concept of every second of our lives recurring an infinite number of times is actually “the heaviest burden” and whether simply being is “splendidly light”.
Nietzsche summarised his fears in The Gay Science with the following proposition:
The greatest weight. — What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your live will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence–even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change, you as you are or perhaps crush you.
. Therein lies Nietzsche’s fear. Subtly that there is no mechanistic governance or law with the universe and that “every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment.” This is philosophy at critical odds with current scientific understanding. It suggests that even posulating on scientific laws is a pointless act as in the grander scheme of things, and there will always be grander schemes, these laws hve no meaning. Equilibria and predictions are illusory and life is generally what we make of it. It contrasts nicely with scientific theories such as Feynmann’s sum over histories. One of the postulates that this theory builds upon states:
This predictability has been experimentally proven and the sum over histories approach links classical newtonian mechanistics with the quantum variety. While it is not at odds and even compliments Nietsches assumption of discrete consequences, it also hints at formal universal governance. So, I guess the question is, why the hell does nature appear to have an order if it’s entirely chaotic? Why does it flatter so much to deceive? The answer would appear to be that it doesn’t. Much like Kant’s inappropriate separation of space and time in his paralogism of pure reason, Nietzsche makes an inappropriate separation of the event from the time and space that it occupies. The uniqueness of the latter defines the uniqueness of the former and the eternal return becomes a moot point. The old jehovah (as Einstein described himself) pointed out that heaviness in the gravitational sense was relative and so it is with eternal recurrence. So even if a rose would smell just as sweet if it wasn’t a rose, is “being” heavier if eternal recurrence is confined to room 101? It’s all relative I guess. Experience is what it is and it’s weight is situational and generally retrospective.
I’ll end with a quote from Kundera himself, illustrating that Kavanagh’s “difference that sends an old phrase burning” defines the moment whereby a new character is conceived, the climax of the eternal return.
“And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel,” Mr. Kundera says of one of the characters, who is described standing at a window and staring across a courtyard at a blank wall. “This is the image from which he was born. . . . Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility . . . the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them. . . . But enough. Let us return to Tomas.”
I’m just blog tired here 😀. Just looking at blogshares again. I’m slightly p*ssed off with the inaccuracies in it’s valuation of my blog. I find it ridiculous that given the numbers of people that use the bloglines blog aggregator that the blogshares spiders can’t bypass the single level of indirection implied by their javascript blogroll. It’s a real pain in the ass as I’m damned if I’m going to do any server-side scripting to dynamically embed my roll in the page. Bloglines was recently acquired by AskJeeves which also owns the teoma patented thematic search technology. The idea appears to be the creation of a search engine that is capable of thematically searching and grouping a massive database of RSS blog and news feeds. Which is a pretty nice idea in my opinion. I wish them luck.
Yay, finally a post about technology. No science, religion or philosophy today. Hell, I’m not even going to consider the ethical or philosophical implications of having to pay for culture as opposed to it being provided free gratis to all. Still, Digital Rights Management (or DRM) has caught the imagination of an entertainment industry keen to avoid getting overtaken by the latest and greatest piracy technologies and the increasingly flexible morality of the general public. They wouldn’t sell us a DVD writer if they didn’t want us to copy movies, right???. I was extremely interested to pick the following article from gizmodo. It really does look like Real Network’s “Rhapsody To Go” service just plain doesn’t work. The technology is Real’s implementation of the the Windows Media Player 10 DRM that lets you rent downloaded tracks and even listen to them on your portable music player. These so-called portable subscriptions are a really nice feature that fits with how most users would envisage DRM. You subscribe to the content and then enjoy it on the device of your choice! If the technology works that is. However PC World points out the many limitations of the service. You range of players that support it’s DRM doesn’t include the ubiquitous iPod. That’s a bit like serving a vegetarian a steak sandwich. A bit pointless really! To make matters worse, PC World failed to successfully transfer media to any portable music player. Here’s a quote from the article:
“In my tests, transferring tracks to a notebook and playing them while I was unconnected to the Net worked fine. Of course, that’s no great accomplishment–other music services have been allowing something like that for years. But despite trying with two IRiver H10 MP3 players, two Rhapsody accounts, and two PCs, and getting suggestions from Real engineers, I was never able to transfer any Rhapsody track I hadn’t bought outright onto a portable player. For me, at any rate, Rhapsody To Go just didn’t work.”
It turned out that Real’s support forums include lots of complaints from customers about similar problems with the Rhapsody To Go service. Real have since updated the software but I don’t have access to a more recent test. Also, in support of the service, Rhapsody’s desktop client has a very nice jukebox feature and the service generates a playlist with tunes similiar in genre to those you’ve already subscribed to. A bit like Amazon’s “people who bought X also bought Y” recommendation technology…