Tuesday, September 22, 2015

summer 2015


September 22:

Eventually, I’ll distill all of my ephemeral excuses for not having an update (or not having a worthwhile update) into a discussion of Project development as being—and having been—part of the Project concept, analogously perhaps as Abstract Expressionism sought to hallmark its own processes of composition (e.g., Jackson Pollock), which is more than framing the character of the medium (e.g., loving linguistic relativity).


Saturday, September 12, 2015

close encounters of the sundry kind



Look at a ruler scaled in millimeters (or think of one). Millimeters are relatively tiny. You can vaguely imagine a kilometer (or a mile, which is 1.6+ kilometers), maybe knowing something in your environs that’s exactly a kilometer away (more or less). But can you represent to yourself a million millimeters? You could have a nebulous visual notion of a lot of millimeters. (Have I done this routine?) But you won’t have an exact representation in mind of a million of them (unless you’re highly autistic). You might be adept at scaling such that you imagine mapping powers of 10 that gives you a feel for the million.

But anyway, a million of those little intervals is visually unimaginable for most persons. Maybe genetic engineering of intelligence will allow a person capacity to literally represent a million millimeters, such that one could look at an alleged kilometer of them (with a sweeping telescopic lens, let’s imagine) within several seconds and say how many millimeters are missing or are in excess. Would one want such a capacity for mental representation? I’ve known persons with so-called “photographic memory,” and I’m told that it’s largely a burden.