"On Wittgenstein’s Skepticism of Sacred Geometry" from Tunaghost @ Disinfo.com

"Isn’t sacred geometry unwittingly trying to make the calculator sacred?" Tunaghost

disinfo.com/2014/05/wittgensteins-skepticism-sacred-geometry/

"Look Up"

“'This media we call social is anything but, when we open our computers and it’s our doors we shut…' This is one of the most vital messages that everyone needs to hear."

Art, Science, and Engineering Come Together: The AlloSphere

"The AlloSphere. It's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber. Think of the AlloSphere as a large, dynamically varying digital microscope that's connected to a supercomputer. 20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere, and be completely immersed in their data."

So begins JoAnn Kuchera-Morin of the University of California at Santa Barbara during the demo of her invention at a TED.com presentation. By combining the talents of artists, composers, programmers and engineers, Professor Kuchera-Morin has built an amazing new device for visualizing scientific data. Her team converts scientific data such as Atomic Force Microscope and FMRI information that is linked to visual representations. While the dynamically varying super-computer translates this data into visual and audio representations, from inside the AlloSphere teams of researchers can immerse themselves in the simulation and discover new patterns of data.

From the macroscopic world down to the spin of a single atom, the simulations come close to quantifying beauty as one sees and listens to data being reported as varying tones and shapes that correspond to physical changes within the system. Like a realtime virtual reality chamber, one can interact with the scene and zoom in and out of different levels and study the patterns of change.

Metaphor and Simulation meet Quantified Science

Often the ability to make unexpected connections between apparently diverse sets of information is the hallmark of creativity. Links between art and science are sometimes viewed as superficial, but in the AlloSphere we begin to see their intimate unity. By connecting actual data variances with corresponding tones, one begins to use more faculties of analysis than the linear view of semiotic presentation, allowing novel associations to emerge.

The ability to think in metaphors keeps creeping up as the key-factor in studies of the creative process, and in the AlloSphere we may see why. Patterns -- or the presentation of information -- are not limited to the medium in which they arise; one may translate one form of expression into the another, as in the case of digital patterns which become translated into visual or audio streams, or Morse Code which is decoded as text. Even our brain itself works on this principle, translating rhythms of bone fluctuation in our ears into electronic pulses to be decoded by the brain, or likewise the eyes transmitting signals from the retina. By linking data from various systems to corresponding tones and shapes, one may perceive patterns that were not apparent in the mathematical or linear form of algorithms.

Case in point: Dr. Kuchera-Morin's colleagues in the Center for Quantum Computation and Spintronics use lasers to measure an electron's decoherence. Her team makes a mathematical model, and the composers attach tones to the data, so that one actually hears a representation of quantum information flow. Because the information is stimulating new brain areas (musical, visual) aside from the mathematical , they are learning new relationships which weren't apparent before the translation.

From a subjective point of view, the audio and visual representations are stunning, beautiful, and elegant. I am simply amazed -- but not surprised -- to witness biological and quantum data being translated into exquisite music and visual representation.

Thus begins a new phase of understanding information! She calls upon the scientific and artistic communities to visit the AlloSphere at UCSB, and discuss new ways to explore complex data as it unfolds in time and space. The AlloSphere is a unique device bringing together the best of art, science, math and engineering. I, for one, can't wait to get the personal tour!

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Demos the AlloSphere

[Original article on Hubpages]

Serpent of Pleasure: Emergence and Difference in the Medieval Garden of Love

"Abstract: Set apart from the normal realm of moral judgment, the medieval garden of love is usually seen as a site that embodies the carnal and reprehensible human desires that humans must renounce in order to find God. This essay challenges that reading. It proposes instead that visual and verbal representations of the garden of love show it as a place where humans encounter the operations of emergence and difference, and through an immersion in the paradoxical condition of love discover a more vital humanity. The garden of love is a poetic and philosophical space in which humans recognize themselves as part of the complex and unpredictable systems that comprise the world. The garden places humans both within nature and in distinction from it, and its message is that human nature is to be honored not by transcending the condition of becoming, but by an immersion in the play of paradox and ambiguity that characterize it. This reading places garden-making, the first and founding practice of landscape architecture, at the forefront of contemporary rediscoveries of the role of complex adaptive systems in landscape architectural discourse."

-- From MEDIEVALISTS.NET

-- Full PDF from Landscape Journal

Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi - The Grid (FULL VERSION) (1998 remastered ...

WARNING

India's #FoodSafety Agency has prohibited the use of artificial coloring agents in ...food, carcinogenic impact of large amounts..coloring..

— Neurophyte (@Neurophyte) June 21, 2013

Connectomes

"What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream. But the metaphor is richer than that. Because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis -- or so neuroscientists think -- of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed." -- Sebastian Seung

Freedom of Fascination

Walking through the bazaar alley

through smoke of mid-day's roasts

and sting of spice

& droning of drum,

sweat of toil

He was struck by the desert imp

again, waves propagating, chiming

visions stirring before the eye

of Within;

Unfurling theatre of What-then;

a geni's carpet, reality-woven

to carry the gaze

unto her, mirror'd memory,

painting with light

shimmering representations

of the poets' own stirring

serpent of fortuitous fire:

that which falls into the infinite

plunging deeper, always deeper

into the heart,

Within descent

the interlock rising

unity of intent & vision

collide in the art, contradiction

become contrast

And the abiding vision

of symmetrical perfection

that did slay

and stir unto mockers

Did awaken and Push

the slumbering driver

as the coach near'd the cliff...

Thus was the tale of Hugo the Hypnogogic.

Cinematic Pleasures of Epiphany

Washed upon the shores of past earth,
I came upon the low house in sand.
Therein, shelter, darkness.

Light within to see
the word written within bone
and nerve, breath moving
the frames, building
a charge of years.

Swelling with divided unions,
I came upon the sunrise afar.
Burnt star collapsing within
that low house, pulling everything

to the center,

focused, beaming,
emitting signals
not heard before.

Yet rotation of realms
about the fixed center (it too moved)

resolved the creativity of speakers
and painters upon the street, coming forth
to articulate

a genuine eidolon.

The Rune Reading in Autumn's Red

Turning, light and rush
of liquid memory caught in
my summer's end, the glances of eye
brushing with gentle lash upon the skin
of the book's pages.

Color of wheat in autumn's rain
tinges the vision, the writer of listings
listing in the seat, in vibrato of the chanting, rolling

tongues and parting lips
meeting in permutational interlock
and release, spilling the icons of action
upon the skin

of the book's pages.

From leaves coiled in leather
arises word in thought's smoke,
turning, 'volving and slipping
in upon itself and out, spreading

into voids-between

Inhaled in the upshoot,
fitting key & lock in nerves'
endless branches, alighting fires
upon the grey-floor of the ancient bonework;

The air becomes electric laughter, rising.

The View of Earth & Sol from the ISS, Nov. 22