When we are surprised by a particular outcome or event, we should consciously acknowledge that there must be a gap between our perception and reality. A surprise should be a signal inviting us to realign our intuition and our thinking so that they conform to actuality. One of the life lessons that mathematical thinking offers us is that we should always reexamine a surprising situation from various angles and points of view until that surprising feeling is replaced by a rock-solid intuitive understanding of the truth.

—from Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird.

As a picky and pedantic point I’d argue that “the truth” there in the last line is a problematic phrasing–I know what they’re getting at, obviously, but the point here is that the surprise is an invitation to move to a more useful paradigm, which is not necessarily the same thing as moving to, or even toward, The Truth.

Still, that’s a lovely paragraph, and I was quite pleased to hit in the middle of a work of popularization.

When I consider the solar system as our working neighborhood, I am reminded not of “the final frontier,” but of Antarctica. Our Antarctic stations are a bit like moon bases that we can reach with airplanes. We staff them with rotating crews, and carry out interesting and useful research, but fully inhabiting the ice is not crucial to progress in history. It may never happen. The solar system might be like that to us for a long time.

—Kim Stanley Robinson

Better to have a good story than a good time. Bad life experiences often end up great material for stories. Good times are often forgotten.

—Jonathan Carroll

A parade is a group, and I’m not a group animal. I think a mob, no matter what it happens to be doing, is the lowest form of living thing, always steaming with potential murder. Several things I could write on my placard and then carry it all by myself down empty streets.

UP WITH LIFE. STAMP OUT ALL SMALL AND LARGE INDIGNITIES. LEAVE EVERYONE ALONE TO MAKE IT WITHOUT PRESSURE. DOWN WITH HURTING. LOWER THE STANDARD OF LIVING. DO WITHOUT PLASTICS. SMASH THE SERVOMECHANISMS. STOP GRABBING. SNUFF THE BREEZE AND HUG THE KIDS. LOVE ALL LOVE. HATE ALL HATE.

Carry my placard and whistle between my teeth and wink and smirk at the girls on the sidewalk watching the nut with his sign.

–JDM, A Tan and Sandy Silence (1972)

Absolutely. I’ve been saying this for a while — as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think.

Correct. And in some cases that’s a fine thing. In lots and lots of other cases, though, that’s the problem. In many, many cases it is essential that we learn to engage our damn brains before our emotions get involved to the points that it becomes nigh impossibly difficult to do so.

I’m thinking about this now after reading about ex-Senator (and ex-Governor) Bob Graham, and how his little notebooks blew some holes in the CIA’s stories about torture briefings.

You can read about it over at The Quantified Self.

This, for my money, is the golden line:

First, it’s worth noting that one man’s spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications.

I’m actually very happy that this particular institution seems to have a hearty dose of institutional incompetence, since I’m quite sure that from my perspective the way they chose to achieve their putative goals is something I’d rather have executed incompetently.

A good romance is defined by a passionate desire. A want of something so near, but unattainable. It’s longing of the future or of the past and the possibilities that could never be. It’s the futility and foolishness of making oneself vulnerable, no matter what disasters may occur.

A good romance rarely ends happily, and if it grips you it has the power to melt and break your heart in the same breath.

It’s committing suicide in order to remember what it was like to live.

Well, that’s a pretty good evocation of something we’ve all felt, isn’t it? Those three paragraphs stand quite strong on their own, without any context.

You might be surprised to find out that they’re actually part of a discussion of the romance between a book nerd and (literally) diabolical temptress in a web comic. But they are.

Perhaps ironically, that particular storyline isn’t terribly interesting to me, even though I’ve been reading Sinfest regularly for almost a decade¹. However I love that description–I love the way it captures that utter disinterest in self-preservation… or maybe even an element of purposeful self-sacrifice.

1. Jesus, I started reading this when I was still in Ontario, that means 2000 or very early 2001–that’s really almost a decade. Where does the damn time go?

“One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, ‘Wait – you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they’ll sign anything’ – like I did.”

—Trent Reznor

I suspect I will now think of record company executives every time I hear Head Like A Hole.

“Man, that's like seeing a stake put through the heart of the 20th century. Watching banks fail is a picnic compared to this.”

—Bruce Sterling
in “You know newspapers are screwed when even the CARTOONISTS catch it“.

Does the word postcapitalism look odd to you? It should, because you hardly ever see it. We have a blank spot in our vision of the future. Perhaps we think that history has somehow gone away. In fact, history is with us now more than ever, because we are at a crux in the human story.

That’s from the conclusion of Kim Stanley Robinson‘s short piece, “Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme“, at What Matters.

If you’ve been following Robinson’s last few books, you’ll know he’s both passionate and extremely knowledgeable about these issues. And this piece can be consumed pretty quickly, but will leave you with things to think about for quite a while.

“The secret of life,” said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Yes, I quite like that. It reminds me of Browning¹, and of process enlightenment, of the constructive and infectious madness of Korczak Ziolkowski, and of one of many smart things said by the Great Defender:

Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.

–Clarence Darrow

Yeah, that’s the classy way to fail.

1. “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or else what’s a heaven for?”

One of many.

I’ve never mistaken my hobbies for real life. I’ve always craved real life, even when I didn’t have one. I’ve sought out life, even when I didn’t know how. I’ve always tried to live real life, even when I didn’t have a clue.

I travel a lot. I talk to strangers. I eat their candy.

—Walter Jon Williams

Go read the fine rant that links to. I heartily endorse it.

“I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via)

“Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” –M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” –Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (via)

“Few things could scare me more than headlines about walking disaster, failed to the top, finance minister Jim Flaherty wanting an ‘extraordinary budget’ with ‘extraordinary measures’.” –Declan’s pithy comment pretty much nails my response to that story as well.

“Watchmen, by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and Cordwainer Bird.” –from Rick Norwood’s list of forthcoming movies. You have to be like three different kinds of nerd to know why that’s funny.

“He was still doing fine work, and he will definitely be missed — particularly as a voice of opposition as Britain slides ever closer to Panopticon status.” –Andrew Wheeler, making apposite comment on the passing of John Mortimer.

“interesting people are full of doubt. People who are totally sure their way is the only way are always wrong. I think self-esteem is a myth perpetrated by psychologists, movie stars, magazines, and the pharmaceutical industry. They want you to think something’s wrong with you because you don’t have self-esteem like you ‘should.’ Oh, please! georgia o’keeffe, beethoven, and mark twain all had their doubts, but managed to get a few things done, and so can you.” –Laurie Rosenwald, in All The Wrong People Have Self Esteem: An Inappropriate Book for Young Ladies, quoted in a review

I’ve just run into some academic research from MIT which indicates that it’s a good thing I never depended on the tinfoil hat: far from blocking the mind-control signals it may actually boost them! Quoting from the summary:

Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

And if you think those tinfoil hat guys are sad now… wait until they find out about the microwaves…

(MAN sits cross-legged in the middle of a pool light. DC. HE mimes smoking a joint and passing it to an unseen companion.)

(Tokes and passes.)

It’s like if a tree falls in the forest, you know what I’m saying, man? It’s like if everybody already knows everything, then nothing means anything. Everything’s a cliché.

That’s why i stopped making art.

(Takes the joint and tokes.)

You know what’s wrong with the world today? Why everything’s screwed up and you can’t do anything about it? Because we don’t live in a human world, we live in a machine world.

(Passes the joint)

There’s this guy, I can see him from my apartment, down in his apartment across the street. All night long, every night, he lies on his couch, doesn’t move for hours on end, his eyes wide open… Now if I didn’t know he was watching TV, I’d think there was something seriously wrong with him, like he was paralyzed or hypnotized or something…

All night long, he lies there and messages from outer space go into his brain “Buy a new car, use deodorant, work harder, your dog has bad breath, buy a microwave oven . . .” All night long, into his brain.

(Takes the joint and tokes.)

I mean what’s a microwave oven, man? Everybody’s got one, nobody knows what it does, nobody knows how it works, everybody’s got one. Why? Why does everybody have a microwave oven? Think about it.

Because the TV set told ‘em to buy it.

I’m telling you man, the government is building this computer, biggest computer they every built. Spending billions and billions dollars. It’s a secret project but I read about it…

When they finish this computer we’re all gonna be dead man… ‘Cause they’re gonna hook this huge computer up to everybody’s TV set. Then they’re gonna reverse the TV set so it can see you in your house doing your thing? Computer’s gonna watch you, man, and if you do something the computer doesn’t like, it’s gonna send a message to the TV set. TV set’s gonna send a message to the microwave oven, door’s gonna pop open, you’re gonna be ashes, man…¹

I wonder if a foil suit would protect us from the microwaves–maybe there’s a market for the Faraday Cage Business Casual line. Not a new idea though, apparently.

1. That’s an excerpt from Eric Bogosian‘s monologue Artist in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, by the way. I first read that in an excerpt in Harper’s in Grade 7–so more than 20 years ago–and enough of it stuck in my brain that I could find it just now with Google.

The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing – is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?

The difference seems to me very genuine. The error is to think them antithetical. The purely commercial writer writes for the editor. The purely artistic writer writes for himself or herself. I write for the reader. As long as the editor buys it, I don’t much care what he thinks of it. If it’s a good solid story, that’s enough for me. But if the reader doesn’t like it, it’s a failure.

(From an interview)

1. More background info here.