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. 

In the way

At various times when I was a kid both of my parents worked. 

My dad always had two jobs: ironwork by day, security guard at a horse racetrack by night. I can still remember, as a kid, always looking up from the floor, watching dad kiss mom and leave in his rent-a-cop uniform and Dirty Harry-style revolver. Honestly, he didn't need that kind of 'strap.' 

Mom worked various places, all retail. Her highlight was Montgomery Ward, which had a store on Main Street in my hometown, back when main streets were still places of commercial activity. She had a degree. Dad had none. He was loathe to mention it. I'm loathe to mention that I got one, now that it's of little use to me in my current work-a-day occupation. 

Something I've come to realize over the years is just how much socioeconomic forces bear upon the family. The weight of it registers in the creaking timbers of family relations. The kinds of squeaks the boards registered in my family were simply time-management and fast and "angry" shouting to keep us 'babes in toy land' in line. Some of this was simply the stress of trying to live like their parents by contributing more and more of their time to work. Time was a factor, massively so. I still believe my dad's real family were the young men he spent 8 + hours a day 5 + days a week working around for the majority of his life, while those kids at home just got in the way when he was ready to shower up, eat, and unwind. My mother wasn't all that different in that she was frantically recreating the life she had without the benefit of time that her mother, aunt, grandmother had. While I know grandma worked out of necessity as a widow with only her then-deceased husband's railroad pension, Aunt Jo had the luxury to quit once she and Uncle Pete adopted their first kid. My mother's mom, well, she died of a brain tumor at 49. My mom's other aunt, Ginny, also worked, but she was a career-focused professional, no qualms about it. She was a bellwether for what would come. But in her day, with no kids, and a husband working for the post office, the two could afford a Porsche 911 and a Cessna. 'Those were the days.'

In those instances when my mother worked, she had to rely upon daycare. Lucky for me, my grandmother was always available to watch and care for me and my brother. My grandfather, close to retirement, would also take us on his little journeys through town, bar hopping, or heading to Tosh's farm. I still recall being driven down the highway, standing in the back of his pick up truck on the way to the farm, a snapshot of a time and context that would be viewed today as much as that dog we kept chained to the shade tree all day every day. Then, both sights were much more common. If we widen our focus, incarceration in the form of that dog chain formed a perimeter around the risk of the dog running away, as much as incarceration would form a perimeter around my grandfather in the form of jail bars had his beer-addled driving resulted in two kids being launched into a mangled piled of misshapen and bloody heaps, crying at the very least, breathing maybe not, on the side of the road. 

But the time I spent with my grandparents wasn't abuse. It was bliss. They were millionaires, nee, billionaires of free time and wisdom that they piled upon me and my brother as much as they piled mashed potatoes, gravy, roast, and carrots onto our plates at lunch. And all of it was cradled, in heaps, by a love that wasn't so time-dependent, so time-harried, so time-truncated, so time-aware. Even though my grandfather liked, collected, and maintained at least a dozen cuckoo clocks in the house they were less about the marking of time than they were about maintaining that metronome-like regularity of the tick-tock that established the white noise in the background of the house. I still remember watching 'Back to the Future' for the first time and seeing all those cuckoo clocks in Doc Brown's mansion gonging simultaneously, thinking that this movie spoke to me very deeply. My grandmother had probably experienced that loud cacophony of all clocks gonging at the same time, and so, through blindness, she read their analog faces and set them all 5 minutes apart every time she rewound them. To this day, I cannot have a room or a house completely quiet as a result, nor do I think my exposure to that house led to this so much as it was a genetic precondition. I am my grandfather's grandson. 

As my grandfather's grandson, I was set in his room before his dress shoes being taught by my blind grandmother how to tie a shoe. Over and over, I'd practice the hitch and the loops. I'm almost certain that I can still hear the voice of an old TV personality coming from a television in an adjacent room as I learned how to tie my grandfather's vacant church shoe as Joan River's voice echoed off of the bends I made in those laces as I tied that shoe over and over again. 

Kids get bored, and so after they lose interest in the task they've been set to, I set about exploring my grandfather's room. The closet where he kept this shoe was opposite the door to the room. Each of them had a full length dressing mirror mounted on them. I learned that if you closed the entrance and looked into the opposite mirror you could look at an image being passed back and forth, over and over and over again. This was my first glimpse at what passed for an infinity slowly snaking off in a retreating 3/4 perspective from the original rectangle frame of the mirror that cast it. Each mirror got smaller and smaller, going further and further back into infinity, and try as I may, I couldn't see into that infinity because that 3/4 offset perspective, snaking out of frame terminated at its origin point: me staring into it. What I couldn't do, to see infinity, was get out of the fucking way. My face, my youthful, inquisitive face was in the fucking way. 

Early soul-body distinctions in Greek practice

If we may judge by the furniture of their tombs, the inhabitants of the Aegean region had felt since Neolithic times that man's need for food, drink, and clothing, and his desire for service and entertainment, did not cease with death. I say advisedly "felt," rather than "believed"; for such acts as feeding the dead look like a direct response to emotional drives, not necessarily mediated by any theory. Man, I take it, feeds his dead for the same sort of reason as a little girl feeds her doll; and like the little girl, he abstains from killing his phantasy by applying reality-standards. When the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse, all we can say is that he abstained, for good reasons, from knowing what he was doing; or, to put it more abstractly, that he ignored the distinction between corpse and ghost--he treated them as "consubstantial." 

To have formulated that distinction with precision and clarity, to have disentangled the ghost from the corpse, is, of course, the achievement of the Homeric poets. There are passages in both poems which suggest that they were proud of the achievement, and fully conscious of its novelty and importance. They had indeed a right to be proud; for there is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death. (pp. 136-137)

As quoted in "The Greeks and the Irrational" by E. R. Dodds

George Berkeley

The account of George Berkeley in Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy," starting on page 647 reads that the presence of GOD the observer of all is what makes possible the universe. Without observation there is no there there. Russell notes that Berkeley's argument rests upon sensation and its seat within one's mind and not upon a tangible reality, per se. The point we can make upon this foundation is relaxing the conditions of an observer to that of an 'interactant' an encounter, a chance collision. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

To speak

The human vocal chords are butterfly wings for navigating through sound. Key to the evolution of sound production is the affordable universe of sound production that gives purchase to such an adaptation. In the probabilistic framework of the universe the voice precedes the sound that produces it. 

Plants have eyes

Plants have eyes. They are green.