there  could  be  snakes  in  here

Eric Smith (2007) If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling on being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied . - Richard Feynman Asked some mates what single piece of information they would pass on were all modern knowledge destroyed. Was hoping their answers would reveal something essential about them, but I did expect some trolling too - which can anyway also be essential. (JH: "Careful now that swan could break your arm".) CW: "Eat lots...

An update on the old better-living-through-chemistry regimen. I now take 12 pills -mostly just nutrients, but still enough to unnerve people. It freaks them out less when I mention the red wine, green tea, and chocolate that form the core of the therapy first . (Not coincidentally, those are three quite intense foods.) Folk find the mere daily regularity of it all about as unsettling as its unnatural substance. I have to take these jitters seriously because I'm not in the business of making veganism look hard, and thereby letting people off: all any vegan needs to thrive is B12 fortified food and a very varied diet. The rest, below, is a hobby, a nerdy attempt at optimising my shiz. For the incorrigible hippies amongst you, I've given wholefood alternatives where they exist. In a day, then: FOOD 100ml matcha green tea (10x the polyphenols of ordinary green tea. Shitloads of catechins, 140mg caffeine, 100mg theanine). What for? There's ...

  Sexual corruption - cos I'd kill anyone for your time ." God, how deliriously unpleasant is this? 'Chop My Money' distils all the helplessly evil symbolism from our club hits, delivers it concentrated. Things indirectly championed in R&B (the blaming and objectification of women; the naked materialism and unbridled egoism) are here openly endorsed, with a smile, ten hooks, and a ready-made irresistible dance move. On first listen you could mistake it for a lovely  Beatlesy theme - "oh, just take the money - I don't care about it...only you." The actual story: "you, girl, are desired by many. Go out with me; I have more money than them. I have so much money that it doesn't matter that you are a grasping she-devil; I am confident my balance will soak up your avarice. Again: I don't care ...cos I gettin plenty." I took the line at 1:40 to be the baffling, terrifying: "You know dem believers gonn...

... only the one enduring the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality . - Jacques Derrida And best of all, we don't pay council tax! - Max & Paddy  We don't think of rent as consumption spending. But it is. (This year I'm going to live without an address - circulating, instead, around the sofas of a kind and bohemian group of friends.) Pardon? A year of bourgeois homelessness? How? Now, I'm a stubborn man, and I enjoy running   experiments on myself, but it remains to be seen how long I can last at this, owing to 1) my long-established need of long solitude, 2) the burden it places on my relationships, and 3) my poor back. Also since we're after much more than warmth and storage space for our bed when we sign a lease. You purchase privacy; you obtain the possibility of giving hospitality (and the possibility of refusing it); and perhaps even the possibility of dignity. In fact, Derrida talks ab...

Mwaa, ebitoke enmeli : agandi mbi muno! Kihaya is a Bantu language spoken by about a million people around Tanzanian Lake Victoria. Despite being one of the larger surviving tribal tongues - with as many mother-tongue speakers as the mighty Kiswahili - at time of writing this, there were no resources online for it, and only one academic text in forty years.* I was taught by several people, young and old, and they conflicted over basic meaning ("omushana" is used for 'afternoon' and 'rainy season' supposedly without homophony , for instance). I suppose this is to be expected in real, unliterary, unacademic languages. Anyway Kihaya shares a great deal of vocabulary and structure with Kiswahili, and the orthography I've used is its - 'e' for 'ay' and so on. It loans a lot less from English than Kiswa does: I only found two cognates in the 200 or so words I learned ('ebegi' - bag and 'etoche' - torch). Note the loan...

"Social Reform", (c) George Cruikshank (1819) GIANT BLACK PISSING GUILLOTINE: "I'm a-coming! I'm a-coming! I shall have you! And though I'm at your heels now, I'll be at your heads presently." The best way to begin learning anything is to read satires of it; this is because satire will present the field's cliches concisely and criticise them memorably, as a part of the gig. However, most economists cannot write, and most writers have naive economic views, so economics is short of this source of instruction, deflation and self-consciousness. Here are some corkers: " A Modest Proposal "(1729) by Swift The original: "solve poverty; make 'em eat their kids." Swift was targeting the treatment of labourers as commodities found over hundreds of years of mainstream economic thought (the Malthusians before Malthus, Walrasians before Walras). Callous scientism is still around in places. It was quite hard to sp...

This is my 'bunch of guys on a mission' movie. You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres . - Quentin Tarantino Ways to see it: As sheer or mere sensation . It's a diabolically entertaining thing. "Hurr. Oh-hoh no! Eee! Hahaha! Ooooooh. (Christ this music's loud.)" It is easy to treat it as if its violence were its content and purpose. As perfect token of a style . "Hmm. Revenge is the sole motivating logic; there are many converging plot threads; the 'good' guys are psychotic; the 'bad' guy is utterly charming; protagonists are massacred in deadpan fashion. I wonder who the director is?" All of his films are (or contain) simplistic on-a-mission plots; it's the various subversions that elevate them. This one's obv the Dirty Dozen subverted with blaxploitation, Spaghetti Western, and modern spoof ingredients. As comedy at the extremes. Sensationalism and the baiting of...

... our court, infected with their manners Shows like a riotous inn: epicurism and lust Make it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a grac’d palace . - Goneril, King Lear (1606) Such a view of life is the meanest form of selfishness, leading in general to vice ... If sincerely embraced and consistently carried out, it undermined all that was chivalrous and heroic ... - New Advent Encyclopaedia (1913) (In which I complain that the word 'epicurean' is really misleading - and accuse Christians, Jews, and rocknroll. There could be snakes in here : addressing your marginal concerns with excessive urgency since 2010.) ********************************************************* I like Epicurus for his lack of melodrama . (Which he manages to have despite living in a melodramatic culture - Hellas - inset in a melodramatic species - us .) Unlike the trendy philosophies of the last 200 years, Epicureanism is able to include and dignify everyday things. ( One syno...

The idea that we teach in the Gospel of Hip Hop is self-creation - that hip hop gives us the ability to self-create... A new kind of creative visualization. A new kind of way to notice God, in that sense ." - KRS-One (...) music allows even the most grave of performers to become wildly eccentric extrapolations of their own self-perception ... - James What's Pop got to do with reality? It is ubiquitous ghetto fabulous candy-flipping phantasy - its lack of realism is why it's popular in the first place - it sprays righteous fiction over our lives. The population of pop with aggressive personalities is not (just) driven by the egos of performers: we do so like to have gods before us. Hip-hop is completely obviously founded upon The Front, The Show, The Braggadocio Exaggeration Extravaganza, but it is far from the first. Its 'realness' never measured authenticity, so much as how much the schmuck lived up to racist myths about blackness . (If realness were ab...

Four years banging your head against philosophers does not necessarily result in answers . You leave with a lifetime's supply of questions, though (as many as you can carry). But maybe only certain kinds of question. Some of the best and most probing issues were intentionally not addressed by my lecturers. When they did come up, they were dismissed as hand-wavy (i.e. vague, naive, poetic, unrigorous, excessive, off-topic) . What this really means is that they require rare breadth and synthetic intelligence to handle - a candle, not a laser - and that even then, the answers to them are open-ended, indexical and speculative. This is why something like Continental philosophy - in spite of all its obscurantism, cultishness and breathlessness - is necessary: it isn't afraid of reaching a little way past 'the' world at the expense of certainty. what is our fundamental relation to the world? what is value? how much of all this was inevitable? (is anything itself necessarily...

The clues you bastards give away! Psych profiles of a seditious buncha bright young things. (I don't know how hard you think about naming your things - but anyway you needn't think very long for your scent to be on it. And it's no more than a scent I'm after.) Title: Romanticise the Future . An imperative; also a statement of his new(ish) worldview. Compare with Douglas Coupland's "EROTICISE INTELLIGENCE". URL: "ithasbeesinit". Recalls Eddie Izzard , recalls Black Books - but is neither. There's a residual presence online for the whole phrase, but that's to be expected - since this URL is a spot-on evocation of the aesthetic in eC21st language; ironically awkward grammar with a nonsequitur dab of twee. Are bees more comic than your average beast? Yes . Formerly: arcolimunosotrexate - a gibberish composite of various medications of his. It ensured you got exact google hits, at least. Presumably dropped owing to a change in self-defin...

(c) Honoré Daumier (1865) 'Crispin and Scapin' I can only suggest that he would combat false consciousness to awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the people snore . - Erving Goffman All interesting theories accuse us of being brainwashed: "You lack information; now, open your eyes": Tectonics (on solid ground) the unconscious mind (you're so unconscious you don't know you've a massive unconscious) Relativity (space-and-time is squishy; no space without objects; no one thing can move ) the Everett interpretation (all possible things actually happen) the germ theory of disease (the world's so dirty you've no idea how dirty) Radical feminism (you're so oppressed you don't know you're oppressed, and/or you're so sexist you don't know you're sexist) Or more generally Critical theory (you're...