Rachmaninov prelude 23-5 by Evgeny Kissin

Rachmaninov prelude 23-5 by Evgeny Kissin is a must see must hear!!





One of 23 nonlinear coincidences???
Kissin is really talented ..

O Fortuna Carmina Burana

Sort of captures ... the day ...




"Carmina Burana" - 'Opening' (O Fortuna)

Music by Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle
Munchner Rundfunkorchester
Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Kurt Eichhorn, conductor (1975)

Neural Science Notes

Nonliner, Nonelephant, Nonnonsense, Nonintutive??

from Kendal et al's Principles of Neural Science
[Google Scholar reports about 2,726 items citing Kandel: Principles of Neural Science] - definitely look at T. Albright, T. Jessell, E. Kandel, M. Posner Neural ScienceA Century of Progress and the Mysteries that Remain. Cell, Volume 100, Pages 1-55 [PDF here].

• Knowledge not stored as complete representation; rather its divided into distinct categories - stored separately


• sense of self consciousness - the I - is sum of connections of independent circuits


• Sperry & Gazzaniga: cut corpus callosum situation indicated separate consciousness for left and right hemispheres.


• Biology's deepest riddle: neural representation of consciousness and self-awareness

---

Minsky thinks neurologists are doing the wrong experiments because they don't have good theories ... for example the issue of mirror neurons ... he believes that those represent goals ... Again he recommend reading The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
Some student asks: What are thoughts?

---

NP Notes:

what is really observed:
a) structure - via mircroscope slices, X-Rats, MRI, Ultrasound
b) function - via region activation [PET ...)
c) electrophysioligical traces [spikes ..}
d) time series of different normal and abnormal phenomena [like voltage/current across synpase, ... or propagation aling nerve axons... associated with different conditions [disease, or induced,eg via chemical or light or sound inputs]

Minsky and Money

Just listening to Marvin Minsky talking about the future and AI ...
so he says ... Money is of no use if nobody wants it ...
interesting

he recommends reading his Emotion Machine

Fernel's Final Causes

Yeah... you probably don't really know who Fernel was ... but he did say a few interesting things ... in particular

the seat of a final cause is in the brain

and that, my friends, nonlinear as it might seem ... is according to Sir Charles Sherrington in Man on His Nature ... and you just cant beat that!

The Hammer Fell

The hammer fell on Thursday ...
Friday was a totally nonlinear day
Today ... recovery starts

Modeling for Tech Visionaries

Modeling for Tech Visionaries by David E. Goldberg - Module 5: The Construction of Engineering Reality -- is pretty interesting ...

you can see it right here ...



check it out [via his blog]

but why haven't we heard from him anymore??

This raises brain questions --- if the brain senses some aspects of reality
why can't the brain sense itself ...possible problem with positive feedback loop???

Will Neuroscience shed light on the glide to singularity

NIH's Neuroscience video treasury --- its not organized yet in either historical or didactic sequence ... but there are a few gems there!

There are, no doubt, some really interesting talks that at the very least can assist in the inevitable glide to the singularity

Kaddish

Ok ... so i am reading a highly nonlinear book for a highly nonlinear reason ... it has to do with the coming nonity ...I am reading Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier. Some people like the book ... some people hate it ...some are just well some where else ...

magnified and sanctified ...

that's really the basics ...

If you're mourning .... that might be of use to you ... so anyway something to consider ... you'll run into the Pali samvega.

The Mystery of the Kaddish: Its Profound Influence on Judaism by Leon Charney is also touted ... don't know if i'll get to this one ... but just in case ... link is now captured.

Good Night Irene

Well ... its just a saying ... a canonical expression that got adopted ...

and besides ... its time for solitaire with a deck of 51

Beyond good fortune

Somewhen things occur that go beyond the unexpected in a good way. Is that good fortune? Is it beyond good fortune? What exactly is it? Is it random? How do you characterize that? What the H do you call it? Does fortune have a anything to do with it at all.

Is it a failure of the imagination -- or --
success beyond measure?

Strange Encounters with Uncertain Reality

Encounters with Einstein: And Other Essays on People, Places, and Particles By Werner Heisenberg is an interesting book. There an interesting little passage there:

... we see that we apparently have little freedom in the selection of our problems. We're bound up with the historical process, our lives are part of this process, and our choice seems to be restricted to the decision whether we want to participate in a development that takes place in our time, with or without our contribution ...

smacks of Schopenhauer's ... and

Dogs are still the only mammals not allowed on the beach ... where is the fairness in that?

nonlinearly strange as well is James Cameron's {Titanic) -- Strange Days ... released 13 October 1995 and on DVD 2002 ...

pretty strange if you ask me ... and might not be connected to quark strangeness at all ... or charm

Transactional Acceleration

Our Tek Era will have ushered a new type of acceleration -- Transactional Acceleration, or Acceleration of Transactions between individuals. I'm sure others have written about this, and I will have to search for the references ... at this point Nonlinear Parker doesn't have the details, but will need to return to this.

Basically, the speed of email / texting/ etc ...creates situations where it seems like the right thing to do is to respond to an email/txt message while the 'flow' is 'on' ... while the feeling is intense ... while all the facts and contexts are at one's finger tips. Tomorrow might be too late ... The day after tomorrow might never come about, if it does, too many things may have happened by then, and all relevance and intensity may have faded.

So where does that leave one ... the pace of communication is accelerated ... one says things one might not have said early on without more deliberation and forethought. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be said - they might or might not, but if said they would be said after more deliberation ...

However, acceleration makes life interesting ... and opens up a lot of avenues ... some good some bad

Bad things happen to good people
Good things happen to bad people
But also
Bad things happen to bad people, and
Good things happen to good people


Random things happen to all of us ...
some of those random things are good .
and some are bad
and some of them turn out to be not so random


.................
Totally randoma and nonlinear ... it turns out that the phrase "Transactional Acceleration" appears in Expanding Realism: The Historical Dimension of World Politics By George Liska. And I thought it was all made up [by me] I guess that was too good to be true. In fact too many things turn out to be too good to be true. And that, friends, ... is the real truth of the matter

Ontology

Wikipedia's Definition:

Ontology is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὤν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence and forms the basic subject matter of metaphysics. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework.

Its sister study, epistemology is a study of knowledge, including the search for answers to questions concerning how knowledge is acquired and maintained.

As a philosophical subject, ontology chiefly deals with the precise utilization of words as descriptors of entities or realities. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

But this is but a small part of the story .... for real men (and women) the Wikipedia offers this .. ontology in computer science

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain.

Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering, biomedical informatics and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe:

* Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects
* Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects
* Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share
* Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another
* Events: the changing of attributes or relations

OK so there YOU have IT

and OH BY THE WAY ... Anything in ontology ... is for real-er men and women ....
I was just kiddin when talkin bout computers .... everybody knows that thats to make the geeks feel good .... wait a second ... they should be feeling good ... the richest man in the world is a geek ... and quite a few geeks are very rich ... so they don't really need special ego boosting .... (How's that for nonlinear logic?)

This is just too circular ...

not pleasure, but freedom from pain

The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics: .... not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Counsels and Maxims
via eBooks@Adelaide

2000 Penn in DC -- (not far from GWU) is NOT painful at all ... how did we miss if for so long?

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr doing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Introduced by none other than Sir Elton John.


How do these come to be? Do they hold sway? A surrealist would cringe ...

Medical Ethics

Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics: A Compilation of Jewish Medical Law ... By Avraham Steinberg seems to be a very different kind of book ... one wonders about the comparative ethics of all religions then ... are the medical ethics of the different religions very different? If so -- How?

Influences

OK .. here are some books that influenced Mr. Parker ... not in any kind of order ... some of them are more 'kid level books' and some are more serious ...

Isaac Asimov - the Robot Series
Isaac Asimov - the Foundation Trilogy
Robert Rimmer - the Harrad Experiment [this is really orthogonal but lays some social ground work for ...]
Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Piers Anthony - Macroscope
Paul A. M. Dirac -The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Valentin Turchin - The Phenomenon of Science
Alfred Lotka - Elements of Mathematical Biology
Freeman Dyson - Infinite in all Directions
K. Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erving Goffman - Stigma
Edward O. Wilson - Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
Vernor Vinge - Fire Upon the Deep
Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation
John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding -



Books that I really like:
Michael Flynn - In the Country of the Blind
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card - Speaker for the Dead

Lotka's Elements of Mathematical Biology

Lotka 's Elements of Mathematical Biology is a truly impressive resource!

prescient might be the operative term on many matters from simple chemistry to global warming ... He points to the influence of Poynting on his work. He makes some remarkable observations -- they seem trivial at first but are really profound .. like:

"There's clearly a tacit assumption here that because two distinct words are found in the vocabulary, therefore two correspondingly distinct things exist in nature" ...Exposing such assumptions is priceless ...

Another priceless quote is:

But there is a blindness that is not in the eye, and there's a vision that surpasses optical vision

Nonlinear Business - NY Times free access

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night - according to their website ...

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

I can't wait ... hint hint WSJ ...

Now that's an example of nonlinear business thinking