Logical Fallacies & (WWII) Conclusions.

-  Information Is Beautiful is an excellent website, if you’ve never heard of it.  They pledge to give readers “ideas, issues, knowledge, and date – visualized”.  And they do.  They compiled a comprehensive list of Logical Fallacies recently and it’s something everyone should look at to be sure you’re not using any of these in your daily conversations, writing, or thoughts.  Here’s an example, but they have so many more (such as appeals to the mind and appeals to emotion):

CUM HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC – Claiming two events that occur together must have a cause-and-effect relationship (correlation = cause).  “Teenagers in gangs listen to rap music with violent themes.  Therefor, rap music inspires violence in teenagers.“

Or, “… Therefor, all rap music has violent themes.“  This fallacy falls under the sub-genre “Garbled Cause & Effect”.

-  Interview with a someone named Anab Jain, a futurist, designer, entrepreneur, and the founder of Superflux in London.

“The future – dystopian or utopian?

Neither. Messy, unexpected, and increasingly complex.

In the past few years, we’ve explored a range of possible futures, from the dystopian business model of ARK-Inc to the hopeful, humane crowdsourced futures of the Power of 8.

Positioned as a radical and alternative investment company, ARK-Inc by Jon Ardern was a superfiction, envisaging products and services for a post-crash civilisation. ARK-Inc’s stable of products included a short-wave radio that, in event of a disaster, enabled encrypted transmission and two-way communication between other ARK members, a series of books that help mediate one’s response to disaster, and disaster tourism services that helped users adjust to the idea of a looming collapse.”

-  Also via Grinding.be, the aftermath of World War II.  An interesting way to look at it:

-  John from SuperPunch apparently digs a particular part of Morrison’s Batman & Robin.  This is making me want to go back and reread that series.  Frazer Irving is the shit, btw:

-Sonny

Electromagnetic Ghost Non-Fic.

There are things that go on inside of Warren Ellis’ head that few can comprehend.  It isn’t necessarily the things he thinks about so much as how he thinks about them.  For example, anyone can discuss the merits/demerits of Electronic Voice Phenomenon… but to apply that to everything from electromagnetic fields to a Burial album to one’s childhood obsession with a now dead magazine called The Unexplained is something few can dream of achieving.  Perhaps his is a special mind, one that cannot be replicated by any form of artificial intelligence or programming or organic replication.  Or, perhaps he is simply so unflinching in digging deeply into all the things that fascinate and keep him conscious at night that he only seems special.  Regardless, his non-fictional (well, his fiction too) musings are something of a discreet significance.  You get the feeling that what he’s telling you is important, but you don’t know why (See his Do Anything series originally published by Rich Johnston’s site Bleeding Cool).  Now he’s back again… waxing poetic on whatever happens to currently tickling his brain stem (which is, in so many words, “the haunting and the ghosts”).

Visit his site to read entries (as of this post) zero to 15.  Read them in order, this is very important.  Also, open your mind.

And here’s a wonderfully abstract portrait  of the man off DeviantArt:

-Sonny

Open-Mindedness Is Our Friend.

I’ve been reminded, almost continuously lately, how close-minded we can be.  I’m guilty of it too, everyone is to some extent, even if we don’t want to be.  No good can come of it.  Absolutely the only good thing that could ever happen, if you’d even consider this a “good” thing, from this thinking is a stable and unflinching status-quo.  Close-mindedness will not change anything, and I suppose if you hate change you wouldn’t be oppose to being close-minded.  But change is natural.  Not only natural, but completely unavoidable.  Look at your body today, now look at it 20 years from now.  Has it changed?  Look at what’s happening around you.  Has your town/city changed in the last 50 years?  20 years?  5 years?  The Universe, and literally everything inside it, changes with time.  That amount of change and time varies dramatically, but it always persists.  That is the natural order of existence.  Of all things.  So then, close-mindedness is some sort of resistance the natural order of the universe.  It must be, right?  But animals do it too.  Like I said, we all do.  The key is to resist it as often and as much as possible.  Conversely, open-mindedness is the sister of change, of evolution, of the natural order of things.  Open-mindedness, the ability to take the natural order of things not only in stride, but as expected and in perfect contentedness, is a gift.  It should be enjoyed at all costs.  With an open-mind you will rarely if ever be disappointed.  Or disillusioned.  Or disenfranchised.  With open-mindedness comes acceptance, acceptance of the natural order of things.  And happiness is always closely behind acceptance.  A friend also reminded me recently of the Hassan i Sabbah quote: “Nothing is true.  Everything is permitted.“  I’m not trying to preach, just trying to remind myself of the seeds of (this was for me, more than anything) happiness.

-Sonny

Ice SMACK, Left Side.

Rung my bell good & plenty Sunday.  Holy shit.  Never felt anything like that before.  It’s finally going away now.  Doctor said I likely had a small concussion, family and friends thought that too, but who knows?  I certainly was dizzy that day.  ALL day.  I’d lay down for hours at a time, stand up to piss or fetch water or flip a lightswitch and struggled just to find my bearings.  Yesterday I was walking around in public too and it was strange as hell.  Especially up stairs and inside to outside.  People seemed really far away even when they were brushing right past me.  Lights didn’t seem as bright.  Everything felt slowed down quite a bit, especially me.  I know I was probably walking slower than normal, but it seemed like I was crawling along the tile.  Waking up — I’ve been telling people — was the weirdest of all.  Wow.  Day after it happened I woke up fairly early.  It was sunny outside.  It felt like it took a good half hour to an hour to fully wake.  My eyes wouldn’t open all the way, my head couldn’t wrap around the fact that I was no longer dreaming, this was REALITY.  The left side felt so dense, like it was just packed with so much information and brain guts and veins and matter that it could barely handle or contain it.  Beer helped.  I just kinda fell of the face of the Earth for a second there.  One last never-experienced-this-before, fucked up, unique, personal happening for 2009.  Odd year.

Hopefully I’ll be back now, full power post Holiday and concussion.  Eerrr…

-Sonny

Public Lobotomies, Appetite Removal.

Last night I was browsing through the Online Content over at Pbs.org; I stumbled upon an hour long piece about the often times rejected medical philosophies of Walter Freeman.  The show was called The Lobotomist. It delved into Freeman’s mainstreaming of the medical procedure.  Angel of mercy or medical monster?  Convinced that mental illness was the result of physical alterations, or deformities, in the brain, Freeman was convinced that the cure to Mental Illness was through physically tweaking the brain.  He discovered a book written by Antonio Moniz (who insanely enough won a Nobel Prize for his work), a Portuguese neurologist who pioneered lobotomy through drilling holes in the patients head and injecting alcohol into the frontal lobe, effectively destroying it.  Freeman found this absolutely fascinating; for whatever brilliant and/or fucked up reason.

He began performing his own surgeries on mental patients with the help of a licensed surgeon (Freeman didn’t have one).  These surgeries involved actually cutting open the scalp across the forehead, typically, and going in to dismantle the frontal lobe.  Freeman mainstreamed lobotomies however by famously introducing “ice pick” lobotomies to the medical world.  Why?  Because the operation could be legally performed outside of an operating room, and without a licensed medical surgeon on hand; Freeman could do this himself.  In his first ever, Freeman actually did use an ice pick for the procedure, in which he lodged the pick up through the eye sockets (once on each side) and poked the frontal lobe with the pick.  He swayed the pick back and forth, collecting as much of the brain as possible, before pulling it out quickly enough to snap all that brain he accumulated on his pick.

From the very beginning, Freeman had his share of critics.  But back then, the medical community didn’t speak out against one another unless EVERYONE was speaking out.  But, after years of performing these procedures the industry finally deemed the use of lobotomies on patients as a medical disaster.  Freeman was driven largely by his aspirations to “make his mark” in medical science.  And even after his career had been dismissed as a disaster by the entire medical community, he drove across country seeking those he performed his surgeries on in a desperate attempt to prove that lobotomy works in the long term.  Or maybe it was for his own strange self satisfaction, or self mockery and loathing.

This all reminded me of how awesome “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is.  I have a friend who tells me the book pisses all over the movie (big surprise, right?).  Ken Kesey worked as a mental ward orderly, though.  He was involved in the State-sponsored drug experiments of the 50′s.  Kesey’s one of those writers who serves the pivotal role of linking the Beat Counter-culture to the Hippie Counter-Culture.  Anyways…

It’s so hilarious how lots of people think any form of PUBLIC American Media is slanted as far left as it can go.  It isn’t.  In fact, I discovered the Lobotomist by heading over the PBS.org after watching the second half of an episode of “The Presidents” on American Experience.  WHO??  Ronald Reagan.  And the show was quite a tribute to the man; they did mention some of the negative effects of his Presidency, but overall it was a stirring tribute to him (specifically his contraction of Alzheimer’s Disease, and the decision he and Nancy made to make this PUBLIC in order to draw attention to the disease).

I heard someone bitching recently about PBS and NPR; “Well of course they’re gonna lean LEFT!”, he exclaimed.  Someone should tell this guy that they just did a two part episode about the historical figure he’s got the biggest hard on for.  No doubt he’s got a strong case of Reaganitis if he’s talking like that.  American Experience’s “The Presidents” has focused on Republicans and Conservatives just as much as Dems and Libs though:  FDR, Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush.  It isn’t like they’re picking and choosing here to support their communist agenda.  They’re detailing the lives of every President back to the 30′s.  On top of that, I was listening to NPR a little bit after last week’s debate, and they seemed pretty damn fair about the whole thing.  They were alternating taking calls from Independents (or the “smart ones”), Republicans, and Democrats evenly.  Not only that, but after anyone made any point, they’d ask the theatre audience: “Does anyone agree and why?  Does anyone disagree and why?”.  Just because the station houses Sesame Street doesn’t mean it’s your new target now that Air America has been cancelled.

It finally happened, I removed “Appetite For Destruction” off my MP3 player; it feels as good as it sounds.  It isn’t as rewarding (probably) as canceling one’s MySpace account, but similar.  I’ve been at the point where anytime I buy a new CD now, I need to remove something else to fit it on there.  I don’t do any videos, or pictures, or any of that bullshit, it’s just pure music.  That album had become more of a nuisance than anything, though.  I feel like anytime I threw on “Random All Songs”, something like “Paradise City” would show up and ruin what was becoming a very stellar random play-list.  I did have a pretty good one today which transferred from Doomtree to Black Mountain to Bob Dylan to Sonic Youth to Bessie Smith.  Listening to “Attack and Release” right now, and it’s growing on me.  That’s been happening A LOT lately.  Played guitar last night with A: him fucking around in the key of E turned into me rhythming a progression which sounded similar to “Fuckin’ In The Bushes”, although swap the G-F#-F line for D-C#-C line (both starting in E, however).  Will Guns & Roses… I take that back… will Axl and Co. EVER release this new album??  Word was months ago that they’d make a 2008 release, that’s beginning to look unlikely.  That dude Kevin Cogill will probably get his balls sued to the ground by Axl and Co. for leaking the album, or part of it, or some such BS.  Not that I give a blistering shit of course.

-Sonny

Aldous Huxley’s Consciousness.

My lady friend picked up a book for me about a week ago.  In Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception & Heaven And Hell, Huxley examines the state[s] of altered consciousness.  His direct observations come from taking mescaline (in pill form) and meandering around his own house while the observer he hired asks him questions/interviews him.  These questions came directly from Huxley, which seems so very strange.  Knowing that in an hours time you’ll be of a different mind; writing down questions to ask yourself during this altered state.

The biggest point I’ve taken out of the book thus far is the idea that the brain doesn’t ENHANCE experience, knowledge, etc, but rather LIMITS these.  The brain acts like a filter for which all knowledge and information must pass.  Without it, human beings simply wouldn’t be able to handle the vastness of information and experience in the universe.  We’d go insane.  With it, we’re able to take in that which is for the most part necessary (finding food, shelter, companionship, etc).  The use of psychedelic drugs, Huxley says, essentially removes this filter from our brains, letting in all experience and knowledge seemingly at once.  Makes sense though: those who shut off their filter ALL the time do end up going insane (as I mentioned earlier), and those who claim to have religious experience on mind-expanding drugs.

In one specific description of Huxley’s trip, he talks very candidly about his experiences.  Much like my own experiences, Huxley says that he never quite sees things that aren’t there.  Nothing of complete and pure imagination slithered across his hardwoods or anything like that.  But he does mention spatial relationships not making any dent in his view of the things around him.  Such as, seeing three objects in line with his point of view.  A chair in front of him, then a desk, then a table.  It isn’t like the space between these things disappeared, rather the significance of such spatiality did.  When The Mind at Large’s brain filter is shut-off, spatial relationships dive straight to the bottom of the totem pole.  Filling it’s place are things like composition, the most subtle of movements, and color relationships.  Once again, the without the filter he’s seeing things that aren’t essential for his survival (knowing the exact amount of space before he bangs his shin on the coffee table).

Mescaline, Huxley says, is completely unique in one special way.  “Administered in suitable doses, in changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the  in the pharmacologist’s repertory”.

Probably more to come on this…

-Sonny

Links, Presidential Jokers.

-Researchers at the University of Bristol have possibly come across cellular and molecular mechanisms which provide recognition memory; now, we are much closer to understanding the physicality involved in this phenomenon of recognition. This was brought to my attention via this page.

-Some dude named Jack commented on my Atmosphere post, saying he loves the album (When Life Gives You Lemons…) and that he’s listening to it as he writes. I followed the link from his comment to his page jackvalentine.net; it’s a pretty damn good site. He wrote a really great article about “Stuff White People Like”, which I despise (especially now that its been bought by Target Corp.), amongst lots of other great pieces of observation, satire, tribute, and thoughts. Check it out.

-Peace may have a chance in Pakistan. Militants have decided to put down arms (for now) and cooperate with local government.

-I didn’t even know this shit was real… Convening in London this week was the “Hacker’s Panel” to discuss the current state of the Internet, and.. umm… hacking. The panel came to the conclusion that the next big threat to the Internet, and even the world, is “high street chains”. Apparently the country of Estonia was the first large entity to get bitch slapped by the strategy. During a two week ordeal, hackers who “all gathered under the same [Russian] flag” attacked the Estonia infrastructure via “cyber warfare”. They used DoS (denial of service) attacks to shut down government websites, banks, political parties, and much more. Apparently Estonia is one of the world’s more advanced IT countries, which made them even more vulnerable to the attack. Very interesting. Linkage: BBC Article.

-Couple pieces of OUTER SPACE news. Firstly, Scientists have unlocked many secrets to the nature of black holes. This mostly revolves around the jet streams they produce; how they work, why they’re there, dimensions, and power. Secondly, as part of the Hibble telecsopes 18th birthday, images/videos have been released of two galaxies colliding. This is an AMAZING video and I’d suggest watching it. BBC Articles: Video of galaxies colliding and black hole research. Word.

-Batman #675 will be shipped to be soon enough. Which is the middle issue bridging together the “3 Batmen” and “Batman RIP” storylines. I’m a little pissed about Tony Daniel NOT drawing this issue. His Batman has been called a cross between two of the greats’: Jim Lee’s and Neil Adams’. The artist change could be what caused the delay. I’m hoping this involves at least one or two important pieces to the overall Morrison puzzle, and isn’t just a fill-in before “Batman RIP”.

-More Batman shit. There’s a new poster for “The Dark Knight” with the tagline: Welcome to a world without rules. Looks like marketing is playing up on the Joker’s anarchistic philosophies. Rumor had it that one or two very brutal scenes involving Heath Ledger’s Joker would be cut out of the film; I guess these scenes are so brutal it’s almost hard to watch knowing Heath is dead (RIP by the way). But C. Nolan is keeping these scenes in, wanting to show Heath’s last performance totally undoctored and pure to Heath’s vision. Finally, I thought this picture from whysoserious.com was fucking awesome and well worth posting:

(click me)

And with that, I’m out. For now.

-Sonny