Art

Let us imagine that intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion, temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.

Michael Atiyah’s thought experiment, as quoted in Is God a Mathematician?

Having thought about this question a good deal, I believe that math is a human construct in that the Math that is possible is far Vaster than we imagine, and from that gnarly Vastness we choose only one thread. That’s what Atiyah’s quote illustrates to me.

As to its universal truth, validity, applicability…, perhaps all that can be said is that empathic nonhumans might be able to get and accept some of it, just as exotic stories start to make sense to us only after we understand the exotic sensibilities that gave rise to it.

World Builder is a stunningly beautiful video.

A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.

From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.

For a while now, I’ve been pleasantly following Very Small Array, an information design graph-blog, but this was the first time I was really enthralled by one of its designs, FRIENDS:

It’s just so stunningly elegant, isn’t it? So skillfully made to appear casual yet imbued with obvious formal beauty, charming yet minimalist—not a word or pixel unused. Labels and graph, typography and information design, come together marvelously, painstakingly.

This rings so true it hurts.

Auditorium is such a fun, original, spellbinding game! Visually and musically marvelous, it transcends language and is wonderfully unreal, ungrounded in reality, very abstract yet very sensual.

Fascinating, so much more enthralling to me than most museum art. Notice the lobsterish, demonic, shielding, bloody left arm, the snaking, perforating tubes beneath, the right mecha cat-paw, the “fingering” finger within it, the cat-fox-shaped helmet, the nipple patches (that’s one badge you’ll pay attention to), the pubic paleness, the CAUTION - SEX TAPE yellow tape. Such a great image—and it’s not every day you get to make a word like mecha-chimeric.

The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.

Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy: