The Forthcoming Oblio’s Cap

Ground and uplift
for Phaedral

Bach is a chess grand master playing
directly in your brain, higher octave strategy
and tactics streamed into consciousness,
whole worlds evoked where words
cannot get at them, great bass notes
rising as if the dead stepped with supreme
confidence from their graves, high
tessiturae of flute and trumpet tranmuting

birds and the brilliant stars into an abstract
realm wherein mind and heart pulse
upwards, mere sky metamorphosing to
sheer heaven as the music flows. Gravity
Simone Weil once juxtaposed to grace:
ground and uplift are one pull with Bach.

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Via the Christian Science Monitor:

2010 is a futuristic-sounding year, but is it time to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a robot? That’s what PETA wants to do this Groundhog Day.

Would to God I had nothing more important about which to worry.

Meanwhile, I’m about ready to jettison Xmas and all the other big holidays and make 2/2 my only serious celebration, with Bill Murray/Harold Ramis as my prophets. “It’s going to be cold; it’s going to be grey; and it’s going to last you the rest of your life.”

Peace out.

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Well, so as to keep some sense of common experience with my best friend Chris, I jumped on the motleyread bandwagon. Besides, it was good for me to read a little lit-rah-chuh, certainly. Now I’ve read “The Sisters” and either it’s a hidden camera or I don’t get it. That is, maybe it’s nothing but what it appears, like a hidden camera showing details of conversations to which one is not concerned or related. If there’s more, if there’s symbolism or deep meaning it’s lost on me.

I read about half of it outloud, which was fun.

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That al-anon explicitly embraces something akin to family-systems-therapy perspectives makes it a pretty easy fit for me. On the other hand, the alleged non-religiousness, in the face of God, God, God all over the literature and on the fervently grateful powerless lips of so many of the speakers, that’s a hurdle sometimes. Heck, if they’d just substitute “Higher Power” every where it says “God” things would be less…

…less what I can’t say. But I would feel less like a hypocrite, less like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if the language was quite so God-ish. It’s a major barrier for me. I would love to convert to Catholicism or Judaism or belong to some other faith group…but I don’t believe in their gods and my own ersatz faith precludes my pretending, especially for so vulgar a reason as social acceptance.

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I suspect that the general anti-intellectual vibe of our nation has little to do with the recognized pitfalls as lampooned by Swift with his depiction of Laputa. I suspect American anti-intellectualism rests squarely on the ontological insecurity experienced by the weak-in-faith when confronted with science education (e.g., astronomy’s holding about the age and origins of the universe, biology’s holding about the age and origins of H.Sapiens, …)

Where this bites the GOP in the ass is exactly that place where it has embraced the anti-science/anti-intellectual fringes of our society. Relying on the ontologically insecure to bolster the voting turn out might also figure in the prevalence of fear-oriented rhetoric in recent years.

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Obsessed today with a new definition of consciousness:

Consciousness is the smell of your own fart.

Now, wait, I’ll unpack that some. Consciousness is sensory reports on those parts of the sense-organ’s environment that are also tied to the sense-data-collection-and-processing system. Animals have this level of consciousness. Human consciousness has the added feature (bug?) of allowing purely arbitrary association of various sense data with each other.

By this definition the web certainly has human consciousness and much much more. The only question is, why would it ever want to talk to us on our level, any more than I would want to talk to one of my neurons?

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http://polig.daa.jp/monolist.html

Like space invaders…on three planes.

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I am vastly better at deconstructing than constructing. The meta-model, Bandler and Grinder’s most lasting and valuable contribution to the mind sciences, is a tool of deconstruction, of taking concepts and perceptions back to the very basics. Two decades of work with patterns of presupposition, practicing the art of rooting out that which has been presupposed and asking if it that presupposing is merited, two decades of this practice have left me little practiced in seeing trees, much less forests.

No, that’s not quite right either. First, even as a youth I was vastly more comfortable thinking of life in terms of the cosmic or the sub-atomic than the human. I can see us as infinitesimally small particles of a wide and expansive multi-galactic universe. I can see us a multi-galactic universes comprised of near infinite amounts of electrons and protons and neutrons. But I have to shut off something deep and integral in order to just function as a person with other people. I can do it, it just takes work, it just takes avoidance of that inhuman something. I long to see the world as Condon did, slowed down by a ratio of 90:1, watching a family at dinner, seeing the patterns within patterns within patterns. That is, I long to see it without having to take a video and slow it down, I long to see it with these eyes, as my mind already conceives us all that way. I already conceive us all as pools of chemicals, our minds as epiphenomena of the photo-electro-chemical processes of vision and the mechanical-electro-chemical processes of sound and touch, the chemo-electro-chemical processes of smell and taste. I see forests, ranging over half a continent, as a vast intelligent creature. I see the web as a sentient being in which we each serve a place something akin to neurons. I see cell walls and photosynthesis. But where will I ever see me?

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The Biliski case has almost 70 amicus briefs, over 20 of which are neither supporting plaintiff nor defendant. I’m working my way through them. This post will grow accordingly.

PDF:Brief for Timothy F. McDonough, Ph.D. in Support of Petitioner

Ok, this is going to go on too long for this format. Back to vim to take my notes. Look for more later.
McDounough’s main point seems to be that 2/3 of the economy is service so limiting patent to tangibles fails to serve economy. I don’t think that is at all compelling. What’s the basis for distinguishing patent from copyright from trademark in the first place? And while 2/3 might be service, that remaining 1/3 is of a different type. Look at the IT industry. What of value in that industry is services (programming, customer support, &c), what percent intangible “property” (software), what percent hardware (cpu, motherboard, &c). Stipulating the vast majority is in the non-physical, so what? The non-physical does not exist, cannot exist, without the physical. Arguably, patents can/should be the subject of enabling technology, not the actions enabled thereby. Can’t eat a handshake, and there may be legitimate reasons to tie the patent monopoly to tangibles.

PDF Brief for Borland Software Corporation in Support of Petitioner

55 pages, just looking at the summary for now. Same plea about economic impact. Nice statement of why “or” is dis- rather than conjunctive. Same avoidance of legitimate differences between things that enable and actions enabled thereby.

PDF: # Brief for the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Support of Petitioner

Nice header.

Since the Court has last taken up the issue of patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101, two industries the Court weighed in on, biotechnology and software, have been high growth areas in the U.S. market. The United States remains at the forefront of these fields due, at least in part, to these broad intellectual property rights confirmed by this Court.

The relationship between the Court’s ruling and the rise of these industries is not, at this point, established, but instead presumed.

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War brings change. Change, evolutionarily speaking, can often be good. War culls and stirs the gene pool all at the same time. These are not particularly novel observations, but apparently Google finds them important enough to capture iconically with their home page graphic this Veterans Day, 2009, in a picture that any student of subliminal advertising can instantly appreciate:

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