Meanings of Systems

Be bold and behold the new world that stretches out at your feet.

The The The Ph-Ph-Philipipip Glassssss BlBlBlog Blog The Philip Glass Blog. All music is a drone you know. Just stick with it and the whole world will become music before we are even aware of it.

How would someone else do it? Obliquely of course. This is the textual equivalent of something but I forget what in the split second between writing the beginning and end of the sentence. Enough leaning.

I tried to use an oblique strategy to kick-start today's entry but it backfired (The TT races must be on at the moment in order for there to be so many motorbike references). I have nearly finished reading A Little Knowledge and have got beyond the Philosophy and into the hard science. This is not to have a go at philosophy; it can be far more interesting than the nuts and bolts of the world; but some philosophy is just obvious and worse some is just long words to make the author or speaker sound clever. Sartre taking up Marxism not beacuse of its politics but because of its philosophical implications seems to me just an insult to all the poor people who suffered under that the flawed Soviet version. Sartre never had to work in a tractor factory or trudge the Steppes with heavy loads. Celebrity Communism! Still real science can segue into airy metaphysics at any point (unless you are Richard Dawkins) and without warning. The Big Bang used to be the beginning (and end) of time but now all this membrane theory has opened up the possibiloity of things beyond. Is it just that not even the Scientists could comtemplate there being nothing else without them actually having some equations to stuff some numbers. Do cosmologists only ever bother if they can plug some numbers in? I bet Steven Hawking thinks outside of numbers and has a damn good imagine now and then. It would be sad if physicists only ever programmed the world rather than imagining it. I could certainly think of something on the 'other side' of the Big bang. I was pretty certain that what I imagined was never going to be correct but the idea was there. Can a machine say there is no way of describing this concept therefore it definitely does NOT exist. The machine would not even begin to think about these things unless of course it was programmed as a Devil's advocate and would always question conventional wisdom or the hard and fast rules of science. Always start from the view that something IS possible because even if that thing you imagine is later found out to be NOT possible, you will at least get some interesting arguments and maybe some useful insight into the real case. Is this everything and nothing again? Question everything and assume everything IS possible before you start.

All this reminds me very slightly of Arthur C Clarkes three laws so it is apt that Mr Clarke has an interview with the BBC to celebrate his 85th birthday. Which, in turn reminds me that I saw Rendezvous with Rama - the book - in the Garage. I should read it again. There is no film as yet and just looking around I have found that David Fincher and Morgan Freeman are aiming to make a film of it -release 2004 but don't hold your breath.

I would be a serious mistake ... to juggle with live scorpions. Apparently, Saddam Hussein is in league with Aliens who have genetically enginneered giant scorpions to be used as guards around secret desert hideouts in Iraq. Even those wacky people at Fortean Times said that this was unlikely. But for the source to be Pravda. You remember what they used to say; there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestiya. I could not find a link to Izvestiya in English
so brush up your Cyrillic which was named after Saint Cyril the Obese. I made that up for comic effect but I find that it really is named after Saint Cyril though he was not Obese. Maybe that was sub-concious. I did do a lot of typsetting in Cyrillic a few years ago so I suppose I must have found that out. O life is just a great big Pomegranate for me to feed my face.