logopetria

“Percussion Gun” - White Rabbits

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:22:46 +0100

“Percussion Gun” - White Rabbits

Autechre - Gantz Graf

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:42:53 +0100

Autechre - Gantz Graf

High-Speed Robot Hand: “Ishikawa Komuro Lab’s...

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:01:40 +0100

High-Speed Robot Hand: “Ishikawa Komuro Lab’s high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation.”

An illustration of the “nice bijection between the set of...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:32:00 +0100

An illustration of the “nice bijection between the set of binary planar trees and the set of 7-tuples of such trees” from Marcelo Fiore’s paper “Isomorphisms of generic recursive polynomial types”, as discussed here.

"A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music..."

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:04:19 +0100

“A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. […] Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made — all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer. Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence […] Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.”

- “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (PDF link)

Please Say Something by David OReilly

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:53:49 +0100

Please Say Something by David OReilly

The narrow background stripes are orange and magenta. What...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:10:04 +0100

The narrow background stripes are orange and magenta. What colour are the bigger spirals? Green and blue, right? Zoom in closer and look more carefully.

via blogs.discovermagazine.com

Look Around You - Slimby (warning: scary picture)

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:10:42 +0100

Look Around You - Slimby (warning: scary picture)

Ghost in the Machine: The Clash (via iri5)

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:52:59 +0100

Ghost in the Machine: The Clash (via iri5)

"It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is..."

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:49:50 +0100

“It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough.”

- The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub by David Foster Wallace (April 2000)

Cognitive Hazard (from Warning Signs Flickr set)

Fri, 15 May 2009 07:22:18 +0100

Cognitive Hazard (from Warning Signs Flickr set)

Long-Exposure Shot of a Roomba’s Path (via Gizmodo)

Sat, 09 May 2009 13:21:29 +0100

Long-Exposure Shot of a Roomba’s Path (via Gizmodo)

"One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I..."

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:25:21 +0100

“

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.”

And the student was enlightened.

”

- From Broken Koans and other Zen debris by David Chess