winnit

Bigelowii 2: Electric Boogaloo

There are plenty of books which are scarce but not sought after. Not necessarily because they lack intrinsic value but simply because they are forgotten. Beautifully crafted antique books which can be bought for almost nothing nowadays since the collector’s value isn’t there.

The unfortunate thing here is that the swastika was appropriated by a genocidal regime. The symbol still has a totally different life in India and Japan.

In vino veritas

I once visited an army surplus store which stocked a kind of string vest which looked like a fish-net but with thicker cords. The proprietor claimed it was developed by the Swedish military for its effectiveness in hot weather but didn’t become popular because of pushback from soldiers who didn’t want to wear it because it looked kind of gimpy.

Yeah, that’s what he’s saying. That Lays are called Walkers in the UK.

Even if they are ugly when they are living, they're wonderful to behold when they burn! I would hazard a guess that they're unpopularity with people stems from their popularity with ticks.

Veritable, though infrequently used today, is, in its origins, synonymous with true.

In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.

Or Wyndham Lewis’s ‘The Childermass’, which is 300 pages odd without chapters, just one continuous chunk of prose.

I suppose it depends on your definition of civilisation. I agree that emotionally the quote conveys a laudable sentiment but technically, it would probably be more correct to state the opposite i.e. that civilisation began with slavery. As the beginnings of civilisation are usually correlated with the the beginnings of agriculture and agriculture, arguably, created the demand for workers which allowed slavers to flourish.

Of course, the lengths are just doubled. If someone travels twice as far to get to someone’s home they also have to travel twice as far back. If the two met in the middle instead there would be four journeys but each would be half as long (2+2=1+1+1+1).

Nicotine is only toxic in high doses, which naturally greatly exceed that which you get from a patch. You could say the same thing about basically anything; say someone recommended eating a banana to cure cramps. Potassium is also toxic in high doses. I agree yoga is a great practice but that doesn’t exclude the beneficial effects nicotine can provide. For example, I can chew nicotine gum during exams but I can’t do yoga.

They mentioned they are currently developing twistrons made from other materials. They state that the current material, carbon nanotubes, are too expensive for large scale applications.

I thought it came as a dry powder you combine with water and shake?

There can exist a third category in which things are neither just nor unjust. It really depends on whether your logic system is two-valued or many. There isn’t any universal standard. Can’t you see that there are distinctions in strength between trust, don’t trust and distrust? If you’ve never dealt with someone before, you might not trust them. But you wouldn’t distrust them without specific reason.

That depends whether you consider things must either be just or unjust or whether they can simply not be just, without being an injustice.

Could you share any of those abstracts? I would be intrigued to read some research that highlights similarities between now and a century ago.

The article is a little contradictory on that, it first states that Brian Sibley is the editor but in the quote of Brian Sibley he states his task as 'bringing together J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings (under the editorship of Christopher Tolkien) relating to the dramatic history spanning the Second Age of Middle-earth'.

Agreed. William Burroughs conducted cut-up experiments in the 20th century, where he would take disparate texts and splice them together. The surprising result was how often they recombined into new meanings. One of his motivations was to stimulate his creativity through accidental quasi-random inputs. I am content with seeing reading in a similar light; texts carefully written but carelessly read - like in abstract art, we are usually happy to let the text recombine in ways which say more about ourselves!

I actually disagree with your example. Taken ultra-literally, it could mean that 'I' was 'perched' and 'saw three black crows'. So I feel that 'crows black' was fine and French places adjectives after the word as standard. I have to rely on context to interpret the sentence, and that creates an iota of doubt which makes it read clumsily, or me read it clumsily. I think it's very nuanced and personal.

It's interesting because I've heard that one of the benefits Sanskrit poets had in their ability to introduce complex structural patterns in their poetry, is that the meaning of sentences is largely independent of their word-order - meaning the lines can be reordered to freely introduce rhyming schemes etc. Yet the language has many grammatical elements; gendered word endings and so on.

Doesn't it rather rhyme with 'ethnics'? 'ethics' is to my ear, a half-rhyme...

Well they certainly have lawyered up!

No problem. As displayed in the video of the dead fish, although initially well-placed and enjoying the neutral flow region/sweet spot, perturbations eventually force it forwards into the obstacle. The live fish has to be able to detect those perturbations effectively enough to avoid similar situations. If not, the fish would have to actively swim back into the sweet spot to begin enjoying the benefits again, as you say 'start from scratch'.

You're absolute right and the process is sometimes referred to as 'tuning'. A living fish is generally looking to hold station and avoids the region closest to the obstacle which draws it forwards towards the obstacle. The process is conducted by the natural elasticity of the fishes tissues but the fish does activate muscles in reaction to perturbations in the flow. So, to conclude, I think that the fish is mainly actively putting effort to first find the 'sweet spot' and then keep itself there, the actually act of 'tuning' is typically considered a passive process and can be seen exhibited in any well-positioned flexible object e.g. a ribbon or string placed in a flow will oscillate at the vortex-shedding frequency. So in terms of the question they ask, it is relevant because the fish needs to be able to detect small perturbations in the approaching flow in order to react to them and maintain its position, the goal being to minimise active muscular contractions and maximise efficiency.

I would prefer to think he's suggesting that diversity is a representation of cultural background, rather than suggesting that between racially different individuals that have had similar life experiences (upbringing, education etc.) there should be segregation. Agree that the cynical view of the role of measures ensuring diversity in the workplace needs expanding upon though. Perhaps he means that nowadays diversity isn't ensuring equality but rather the quotas can be met in a workplace where the minorities are still discriminated against e.g. in any team there are members who do more work than get credit for and vice versa - perhaps he means there's currently a racial bias at play behind this? I don't know, maybe I'm giving too much benefit of the doubt... or too little.

Perhaps it's a little out of step with today's empirical approaches. Sure, it's a (currently) untestable hypothesis but they speak themselves of how LSD could help open us to seemingly unlikely ideas. Besides, if logical positivism hadn't already been abandoned by the time of this interview, it's certainly lost credibility since.

Here's the link, it is actually by Bruce Sterling as another commenter pointed out to me. https://1lib.sk/book/4373271/0a0915

No, you're right - it was Bruce Sterling!