I like this site.

Chaos Theory and Fractals

I found a fun community

word_whores

Only my truest friends can attest to how accurately that phrase describes me.

I'm off to a protest in just a few minutes

Anti-war protesters scale Big Ben

(no subject)

I just got home from the peace protest. It was an energetic morning.

( Read more... )

by way of prema

A Gathering of Planets

March 19, 2004: Every few years or so, something wonderful happens: all five naked-eye planets appear in the evening sky at the same time. You can walk outside after dinner, and without any kind of telescope, see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter.

Now is one of those times.

The show begins on March 22nd at sundown.

Oh!

And right before I left, the mailman came and delivered the first of two Amazon boxes. Julian Jaynes is in the hizzouse!

Already, I know I'm going to like this book.

Our view of nature is largely a matter of changing intellectual and literary fashions, for it has become a world strangely alien to us. This estrangement is intensified in a time and a culture wherein it is widely believed that we must depart from the principles which have hitherto governed the evolution of life. For it is felt that the future organization of the world can no longer be left to the complex and subtle processes of natural balances from which life and man himself arose. When the process brought forth human intelligence, it introduced an entirely new principle of order. From now on, it is claimed, the organization of life cannot happen; it must be controlled, however intricate the task. In this task the human intellect will no longer be able to rely upon the innate and natural "wisdom" of the organism which produced it. It will have to stand alone, relying strictly upon its own resources. Whether he likes it or not, man--or rather the conscious intelligence of man--must henceforth rule the world.

This is an astonishing jump to conclusions for a being who knows so little about himself, and who will even admit that such sciences of the intelligence as psychology and neurology are not beyond the stage of preliminary dabbling. For if we do not know even how we manage to be conscious and intelligent, it is most rash to assume that we know what the role of conscious intelligence will be, and still more that it is competent to order the world.

-- Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman (1958), p. 2.