Training the Janissary

The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state. It took boys from the sheep-run and the plough-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries, and made them rulers in the greatest of Mohammadan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. ... Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called "human nature", and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children forever from their parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold upon property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction, taught them a strange law, ethics, and religion, and ever kept them conscious of a sword raised above their heads which might put an end at any moment to a brilliant career along a matchless path of human glory. (p. 210)

...

It is always the way of the Turks, whenever they come into possession of a man of uncommonly good parts, to rejoice and be exceedingly glad, as though they had found a pearl of great price. And, in bringing out all that there is in him, they leave nothing undone that labour and thought can do--especially where they recognize military aptitude. Our Western way is different indeed! In the West, if we come into possession of a good dog or hawk or horse, we are delighted, and we spare nothing in our efforts to bring the creature to the highest perfection of which its kind is capable. In the case of a man, however--supposing that we happen to come upon a man of signal endowments--we do not take anything like the same pains, and we do not consider that his education is particularly our business. So we Westerners obtain many sorts of pleasure and service  from a well-broken-in horse, dog and hawk, while the Turks obtain from a man whose character has been cultivated by education the vastly greater return that is afforded by the vast superiority and preeminence of human nature over the rest of the animal kingdom.

(pp. 211-212)

as quoted in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Appalachian Devo

The modern Ulstermen, however, are not the only surviving overseas representattives of this stock; for the Scottish pioneers who migrated to Ulster begot 'Scotch-Irish' descendants who re-emigrated in the eighteenth century from Ulster to North America, and these survive to-day in the fastness of the Appalachian Mountains, a highland zone which runs through half a dozen states of the American union from Pennsylvania to Georgia. What has been the effect of this second transplantation? In the seventeenth century the subjects of King James crossed St. George's Channel and took to fighting the Wild Irish instead of the Wild Highlanders. In the eighteenth century their great-grandchildren crossed the Atlantic to become 'Indian fighters' in the American backwoods. Obviously this American challenge has been more formidable than the Irish challenge in both its aspects, physical and human. Has the increased challenge evoked an increased response? If we compare the Ulsterman and the Appalachian of to-day, two centuries after they parted company, we shall find that the answer is once again in the negative. The modern Appalachian has not only not improved on the Ulsterman; he has failed to hold his ground and has gone downhill in a most disconcerting fashion. In fact, the Appalachian 'mountain people' to-day are no better than barbarians. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft. They suffer from poverty, squalor and ill-health. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarians of the Old World--Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans and Hairy Ainus; but, whereas these latter are belated survivals of an ancient barbarism, the Appalachians present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.   (pp. 179-180) 

as cited in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Killing Mrs. Collins

"'November 27. Got one fox and seven grouse; killed Mrs. Collins. She weighed 250 pounds.'

Mrs. Collins, in case it hasn't been guessed was our pig that we had brought along for a midwinter treat" (p. 167).

 from Carston H. Bodfish and Joseph C. Allen's "Chasing the Bowhead"

turbulence

Turbulence in the air. Turbulence everywhere. Tubular, when you're surfing the turbulence, taking advantage of wave action, a vast sinusoidal wave of molecules resulting from a collision between sand and sea. Crash, crash, the waves regularly arrive, rise, and fall. Turbulence is that place between order and chaos. Turbulence is a food, a foothold, an affordance for accumulating non-regular effects. Turbulence is where human behavior becomes invention, which radiates out into a world, copied endlessly, and featured within the epigenetic library of adaptations. This is how turbulence is put back into the tapestry. Food inventions change gut biota. Animal adoptions change the immune system. At the molecular level, all of life is one vast tapestry of surfaces held together by static bonds. And to there we go to understand from where we came. Life's reality is an instar of the universe, a place in the succession of being toward the crystalline ceiling of ultimate order. In the evident instance that life develops it is an instauration as well. Every move, every adaptation over time, every observable behavior is turbulence. Adoptions, adaptation, change is substantiated as changes in the tapestry. Those changes are turbulence. All of life is a dynamic, energy dependent system, that precariously and obstinately maintains its order from birth, development, and senescence. And what all of life essentially does is churn the molecular tapestry around it. All of multicellular life is based upon its non-communal doppelganger, the unicellular organism. In the case of life on earth, several bacterial dynasties over billions of years essential terraformed earth's atmosphere and environment into one habitable for larger life forms. Bacteria were Maxwell's first demon selectively interacting with available elements within its environment and churning out a different molecule as a waste product. A billion years of freeing up oxygen by large bacterial vents within the ocean is what makes possible more varied and complex molecules leading up to life as we know it today. The reordering of elements contributes to the environment in which any potential life form can find purchase as a necessity to existence especially one leading toward the complex. Any one of our communal cells is a simple suppressor gene mutation away from returning to rogue unicellularity making it's cellular neighbors its environment and being a bad one at that. If we're to find a will to life, it's in how the turbulence is navigated, used, that is, in the dynamics of molecular interaction something time-variable to each interaction occurs. Turbulence is the instar, a developmental stage, a manifested feature of the universe with an arrow of time to flavor its change. The modeled and acted upon reality of an organism comes from a bioelectric cell, which represents an outgrowth of electrical gradient asymmetries. The enormous static charge of a mitochondrion is likely what led to its inclusion within eukaryotic cells, welded by static to their surface. An essential life process, the membrane, collides with an electrical potential within a material universe of life defined by how the membrane alters it local properties, shoving thing out of the way while bringing other things in. We can continue to drill down but I must comment that on the whole life is of and in the universe, and in locally sustaining as an order system, establishes asymmetries that potentiate the charge and discharge of electricity to collect locally available atoms from an environment. Every complexification upon this scheme, up to and including human behavior, is the use of life's essential affordances made manifest through its dynamic molecular tapestry. Life is an organizational feature of the universe that establishes differential gradients for interacting with its local universe. The enormity of this realization is in our experience of a real-time dynamic change in countless trillions of atoms that can be ordered enough to substantiate as lifefrom behaviors, built on the basic premise of selectively establishing an interior apart from an environment, and using that potential gradient as the base interface of any cell with its local universe. The orchestration of this, and how we perceive it, is a befuddlingly unthinkable coordination reaching down into a tapestry of the universe: locally available atoms and locally available energy sources. And we must believe, if we're to be unshirking materialists about the matter, that consciousness is encoded in a maintained electromagnetic spectrum potentiated by cell charge gradients. Existing within that realm is what flavors the speed of behavior and experience. Moving electricity makes possible near-instantaneous changes across space and time possible. All of life's mentation and consciousness operates within how its cells have harnessed that inherent feature of the universe in order to encode itself in electromagnetic spectra. 

failed big picture e-mail

Gentlemen,

Imagine your life as this three dimensional volume of the universe being continuously 'redrawn' along a projected surface that by our observation resembles a coil, because our body—that parapet of observation—is ​perched upon a planetary body orbiting a star, which itself is orbiting about a gravitational axis within the solar system, which also orbits some intergalactic gravitational axis. All this spinning and orbiting while careening  ever forward through space and time, occurs as we, mere creatures, emerge from a pluripotent cell, rapidly divide, mature, and senesce. Our experience of time through our lives as a birth, maturation, death cycle reveals how our placement within numerous nested orbits flavors our existence. It's as if our place within the universe as a point, a point, continuously unfolding in space and time is due to the vast digits of Pi that all these nested orbits have calculated 'for ever.' We are, first, a certain point within an ocean of unfolding orbital calculations. That's the seat of gnosis, or more aptly it's both gnosis and the seat. Because at the center of the universe is us, our certainty, emerging as the music of a harp plucked by affinity. Second, being this point tracing an uncertain line plotted by the grandiose movement of all these orbits, like gears in a clock, establishes us as the occult door open between frequency realms and space-time realms. 

the anatomy of a sentence

The sentence has a mouth and an anus. 

interface magic

Interface magic, the magic of the interface, relies upon a visual limitation: the inability to see through the surface of a thing. 

Peering into a three-dimensional structure is a very difficult thing when representing information visually. In a biology book, a cell is represented as a two-dimensional structure, whereas, in real life, that life is a three dimensional, dynamic organism. It's the threshold of the macro, where the micro ends, the cell is a complexification, a higher organization of molecules, which are themselves a higher order of atoms. And so on. There are muons, gluons, quarks, 'and so ons.' the 'andsoon' is a fundamental building block of all phenomena. And so, the 'andsoons' formed what would become the photonic barrier for using vision to apprehend something by way of its surface. 

And yet even the very interfaces built for human-other interaction do just this. They create an occlusion simply for the sake of touching, seeing, dynamically interacting with a discretely designed interface point as a feature of ambiguity reduction, better yet, information reduction. That we cannot see through the lake but a few feet or through the ground at all both become enchanted unveilings as a result of informed interaction with them. What they reveal are the fruits of purposed knowledge, of informed action. Finding ways to fish or to cultivate plants become ways in which the blank surface, the 'matter of fact face' of a phenomenon becomes the tapestry that both conceals and displays that which is revealed through purposive interaction. 

idle games and life

Idle games work within clock cycles of processors and virtual machines. The basis of idle mechanics begins when you click something to initiate an action and it finishes. The product becomes the currency to upgrade this initial mechanic. Eventually, you can purchase another idle tier over and over, each of which is some measurably (often exponential) longer duration but that produces a larger value when it comes to fruition. Given enough of these idle tiers operating you have a successive and continuous flow of currency from which to upgrade and purchase more of each idle tier. In the end, the process resembles a vast, scalable production scheme wherein both time and intervention become the interface dynamics that make the idle genre both addictive and yet casual. 

The reason I bring this up is that it functions analogically when I think about cicadas emerging each year. Having spent upwards of 17 years underground, each of these emerging broods of cicadas, each summer, represents that time-dependent maturation mechanic of an idle game. But in this case, cicadas are living creatures, emerging from a decade-plus long gestation underground, suckling upon tree roots only to become reproductively mature, flighted insects with loud-as-fuck courtship calls on any given summer afternoon to find a mate or die as a meal trying. 

What life, under these time-ascribed features, produces is akin to a maturation mechanic central to an idle game. A cicada, matures for a time, and emerges as a fully productive life form and highly nutritious snack to opportunistic predators. All that cicadas, as lifeforms, do to the idle mechanic is to dramatize it as a life function, seeking both energy in and reproductive fulfillment before becoming merely energy out into the system. 

These are simplistic and lazy analogies, yes, but they do offer a rich analogy for understanding a fundamental feature of life in this universe. Life is an energy-derived system, maintaining optimal order for a duration only to unload that order as a reservoir of accessible energy (in the form of food) to other life forms. And as we drill deeper and deeper into what is energy it becomes a gradient-positive chemical reaction, one where molecular products flow increasingly toward easier levels of availability until they reach chemical stability in some bond, not as decaying bug parts or organic molecules per se, but as universe-stable atoms afloat in a dynamic system. And what is energy that at level but a readily available molecular interchange fuel for potentiating otherwise-locked-up chemical reactions. And so life is an energy reservoir, awaiting this moment where something catalyzes its change into some either some constitutive or constitutive element.