Tuesday, July 4, 2006
The God DelusionBy Richard Dawkins.
Added to the list of things I’d like on my Amazon Wishlist.
Amazon customer review voted ‘most helpful’:
I was surprised to discover that Richard Dawkins and myself have something in common. We both serve a triune god !!!
My God's name is God the FATHER, SON and HOLY GHOST !!!
His god's name is god the NATURAL SELECTION, TIME and HOCUS POCUS !!!
Fancy that.....
The Parallax View (Short Circuits)
By S Zizek.
Added to the list of things I’d like on my Amazon Wishlist.
By S Zizek.
Added to the list of things I’d like on my Amazon Wishlist.
Amazon customer review (warning - some of 'em are nutters):
I don't know why this book is so disappointing. Perhaps it is because it is a bit late. Zizek's attempt to deal with the clash between the advance of bio-determinism in the genetics and pharmaceutics industries on the one hand, and the solidity of the post-Frankfurt social sciences on the other, does not do justice either to the latter or to
the dialectical epistemology which he claims to be trying to rehabilitate.
The real irony for Zizek is that what he is trying to say has already been handled in the established virtuality of literary fiction. First there was George Elliot's The Lifted Veil, the strangest of all her books and the only one that somehow doesn't quite work. Then came Houellebecq's lamentable Atomised reprising 1950s racism and sexism in response to the cracking of the genetic code. Finally there was Gdala's dialectical transcendence of Houellebecq's anthithesis in Pascal's Wager where all the double themes of Z's Parallax (from the centrality of the virtual, through the Lacanian transformation, to the historicism implicit in genetic and biochemical fatalism), all of these threads are carefully disentagled and rebraided in red gold and green.
I thought that it was from Zizek that I learned the idea that the clue to the contemporary default constellations is always to be found in a fictional narrative. I think it is time he deployed a different strategy if he is to engage with the real material challenges of the moment. It's too late for this kind of thing.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural SciencesBookmarked on del.icio.us at 09:50.
Tags: science
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
WOWebServices in a Tomcat DeploymentBookmarked on del.icio.us at 17:21.
Tags: fix, frisch, pierre, servlet, startup, tomcat, webservices
Monday, June 19, 2006
Shambhala Sun - Killing the BuddhaBookmarked on del.icio.us at 09:12.
Tags: religion
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Allesandro2Picture posted to Flickr by binkybink (Alison Grippo) at 00:22 on June 18th ’06.
Added to my Flickr favourites.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
SignifiersThought formulated in Igor’s thoughts at 00:13.
Tags: design, ink, intention, interpretation, meanings, paper, print, representation, signifiers, thoughts, words
Once ‘again’, the temporal markers which the flow of possibly random yet seemingly somehow conjoined flickers of »SOMETHING EXISTS« which presents itself to me as ‘I’ has learned to recognise as representing a linear progression of occurrences through the structural map of happenstance this ‘I’ infers from the way things appear to it quite literally flew by (as, I understand, they are wont to do when fun is immanent), and soon, the me-thing (a) did a decision(b) about what it would do with a book(c), and then the decision made it do something right back; it(b) made it(a) do reading(d) on it(c). It also made things change in the world: suddenly, seeming - through moving ‘as if with voluntary power instinct’ - to be ‘like’ huge cliffs (but probably ‘actually’ not doing so, and so being even more like them than it had at first seemed, apart, obviously, from the whole being-really-massive-and-made-of-rock thing), wave upon wave of light bounced jauntily off the contrast of the ink and paper and each one jammed its being into ‘my’ brain, but their beings weren't what they had been any more; they brimmed with someone else's thinking-chunks. They'd got stuck on when the glancing off the meme-transmission device happened, and now they were inside the ‘I’ for sure, deffo, no messing. ‘OUCH’ I said, also ‘GET OFF’ and ‘EWWWW’ because my ‘I’ didn't want someone else's brain squirted all over the inside of its one; but actually it didn't feel like what the ‘I’ thought having someone else's brain smeared on it would do what ‘feeling’ felt like to it at all. It just made more things happen in the ‘I’. Well, let ‘me’ tell ‘you’, that was just fine with ‘me’. No argument ‘here’.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Detector van?Picture of Enforcement episode taken at 00:00.
Tags: islington, london, police, street, upper






