Space and Time, being of the same nature, may be conceived of as different physical states of the same substance, or as different modes of motion. Even if we accept them only as different forms of thought, we see Space as a solid, a rigid system of phenomena; whereas it has become a banal poetic figure to compare Time to a flowing stream, a liquid in uniform rectilinear motion. Any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.How to construct a Time Machine
Sarah Boyle washes the diapers, washes the linen, Oh Saint Veronica, changes the sheets on the baby's crib. She begins to put away some of the toys, stepping over and around the organizations of playthings which still seem inhabited. There are various vehicles, and articles of medicine, domesticity and war: whole zoos of stuffed animals, bruised and odorous with years of love; hundreds of small figures, plastic animals, cowboys, cars, spacemen, with which the children make sub and supra worlds in their play. One of Sarah's favourite toys is the Baba, the wooden Russian doll which, opened, reveals a smaller but otherwise identical doll which opens to reveal, etc., a lesson in infinity at least to the number of seven dolls.The Heat Death of The Universe
One might question the design of an archive without an index. What can one make of an archive in which one can not be assured of finding a particular piece of information within a reasonable amount of time—or at all? The reply might be that, in this archive as in the case of the interactive museum visit, the focus is not on the artifacts but on the clicking; it must be, since we don’t even know what it is we will see.Digital Transformations of Time: The Aesthetics of the Internet
At first I didn’t discern any principle of order, but gradually concluded that they must have been put in a chronological, almost geological, stockpile following when they were released, since, when I listened to them, one after another came slow and then fast rhythms of different, if not contradictory, genres. I listened briefly but attentively to about thirty records in a quarter of an hour, forming a basic outline of classification. I had never studied music; the few violin lessons that my grandmother had given me were of little use—I had been loath to learn traditional musical notation and so my studies had come to a quick end, lacking any foundation.Sphinx
When a ship has gone 20 miles out to sea, all landmarks will usually have disappeared, and the sea horizon will extend all the way round the sky. Look in whatsoever direction we will, nothing can be seen but an expanse of water, apparently boundless in extent. Outside the ship there is nothing whatever to tell us where we are, or in what direction to steer our craft. Every direction looks like every other direction. Still the accurate position of the ship must be found. The only resource, then, is to observe the heavenly bodies, and their relation to the horizon.
A New Astronomy for Beginners
From that moment on, my grandfather’s life was a downward spiral. His self-worth shattered and completely broke, he began drinking heavily, which resulted in him losing his job at the law firm. Casting about in the early sixties for a job, he ended up at a two-bit agency as a rent collector. His family went down the tubes with him as he endured an never-ending nightmarish series of incidents involving drugs, guns, prostitution, robberies, overdoses, and suicides. Yet no matter how poor he became or desperate things got, he never sold his books. His library was his last toehold to the life of cultivation which had long since slipped from him.From collector to archivist: seven thoughts
It hardly needs saying that the impulse to commit a syntactic corruption leads one at times to omit words, at others to add them or modify them in various ways: the aim being always to end up with a construction that sounds better to the person copying or quoting from memory.The Freudian Slip
The sea as distinct from heaven and land and other water is thálassa, the elemental sea that Achilles evokes to signal the great distance between his home and the Trojans: “Since there are many things between us,/both shadowy mountains and clashing sea.” But the “winelike” sea, the sea that is oínopa, is called pónton—“the open sea,” “deep sea,” “high sea,” the ocean, or what sailors call “blue water.” Indo-European cognates suggest the word’s origin lies in the notion of a “path” or “passage” across the water: “a road where there are obstacles, a crossing,” according to one grammarian. When weeping Achilles looks toward “the winelike sea…stretching forth his hands,” he is reaching for the oínopa pónton, the sea that despite its danger could still provide him passage to the place his thoughts always turn—home.A Winelike Sea
Lapse (læps), sb. 1450. [~ L. lapsus, f. laps-, pa. ppl. stem of labi glide, slip, fall, rel. to labare slip, labor Labour. Cf. Fr. laps (de temps).] †1. Utterance (of words). 2. A slip of memory, tongue, pen, or †understanding; a slight error 1526. 3. A weak or incautious falling from rectitude; a moral slip 1582. †b. Theol. The ‘Fall’ (of Adam) ~1774. c. A lapsing from the faith, or into heresy; a deviation from one’s rule of action 1660. 4. A decline to a lower state or degree 1533. 5. a. Law. The termination of a right or privilege through neglect to exercise it within the limited time, or through failure of some contingency 1570. b.gen. A falling into disuse 1838. c. A falling into ruin (rare) 1605. 6. A gliding, flow (of water); a gliding flood. Also occas. a gentle downward motion. 1667. b. The gliding away (of life, time, etc.); a period elapsed 1758. c. L. rate, the rate of fall of temperature with height 1928.
Lapse (læps), v. 1611. [Partly - L. . lapsare (f. laps-; see prec.), partly f. the sb.]I.intr. 1. To fall away by slow degrees; to sink gradually through want of effort or vigour. Also with away, back. Const. from, into. 1641. † b.simply. To fall into error, heresy, or sin —1667. †2. To fall into decay —1654. 3.Law. Of a benefice, an estate, a right, etc.: To fall in, pass away, revert (to some one) by nonfulfilment of conditions or failure of persons entitled to possession. Of a devise or grant: To become void. 1726. 4. To glide, pass with an effortless motion; to descend gradually, sink 1798. b. Of a stream: To glide, flow. Also with along. Occas. of a person, a vessel: To float, glide gently over the water. 1832. c. Of time: To glide past, pass away 1702.
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Sites which do not have active maintenance slowly rot away, losing their value and utility. Instead of finding answers to their questions or help, users find the online version of the magazines in a doctor's office.
Link Rot
Letters can also vanish more than once, and, like spirits, they can return to make themselves perceptible long after some would pronounce them quite defunct. A classic case is the grapheme h, from the spelling of whose current English name, “aitch,” the letter itself, tellingly, is by now absent. The sign of the sound characterized by linguists as a pure aspiration or a glottal fricative, h belongs to the alphabets of almost all the languages that make use of the Roman script. But the value it designates remains often imperceptible in speech; and in the passage between languages, it is almost always the first to go. The implications of this fact can be severe, as Heinrich Heine, a poet of multiple h’s and two distinct types of aspiration (the pure [h] and the more constrictive [X]), knew well. In the memoirs he composed between 1850 and 1855, he commented on the alteration his name had undergone following his emigration from Germany. “Here in France,” he wrote,
my German name “Heinrich” was translated into “Henri” just after my arrival in Paris. I had to resign myself to it and, finally, name myself thus in this country, for the word “Heinrich” did not appeal to the French ear and the French make everything in the world nice and easy for themselves. They were also incapable of pronouncing the name “Henri Heine” correctly, and for most people my name is Mr. Enri Enn; many abbreviate this to an “Enrienne,” and some called me Mr. Un rien.
H & CO.: The fate of aitch
“(...) we do know that the practice of bibliovoria sacra took root in several of the monastic orders that had formerly been his targets, and that brothers would meet in the scriptorium on nights prescribed by the Khunrathian calendar, to engage in lengthy rituals of song and feast, marked by ecstatic glossolalic outbursts, followed by a final collective inhalation of the designated manuscript, consumed in a frenzy of breath and mandication—Word into mouth; God into flesh.”
Hungry for God
The ancient Greeks considered the question of whether words have an inherent relationship to the things they name, but failed to arrive at a consensus. Opinions were divided among the Analogists, who thought language logical, regular, and predictable; and the Anomalists, who were skeptical. From the discord, etymology emerged as the investigation of
WORDS ... in relation to MEANING ... over TIME
Modern linguists, however, are definitive on the point: language is arbitrary, they say, coming down firmly on the side of the Anomalists. There is no inherent relationship between sound utterances and the concepts to which they refer. Linguistic meaning is created when arbitrary sounds are *codified within a community of speakers.* And this codification of meaningless components into an infinitely mutable, transmissible system is the foundation of symbolic communication.
An Octopus In Plan View
The established scholarly method is to try to verify Plato’s interpretation by looking at Heraclitus’ own words, if possible. There are three alleged “river fragments”:
B12. potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.
On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (Cleanthes from Arius Didymus from Eusebius)
B49a. potamois tois autois …
Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)
B91[a]. potamôi … tôi autôi …
It is not possible to step twice into the same river according to Heraclitus, or to come into contact twice with a mortal being in the same state. (Plutarch)
Of these only the first has the linguistic density characteristic of Heraclitus’ words. The second starts out with the same three words as B12, but in Attic, not in Heraclitus’ Ionic dialect, and the second clause has no grammatical connection to the first. The third is patently a paraphrase by an author famous for quoting from memory rather than from books.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Memory, origin of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spider’s web to catch as much world in it as I can. In the midst of my self-spun web, there I can sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.
Because my memory is undergoing a sea-change. Though I am certain I remember, I am no longer sure what it is I remember nor, indeed, the reason why I should remember it.
The Scarlet House
The postwar era was at the same time a period of intense Norwegianization. At the age of seven, we were put into boarding schools, away from the Sámi language and culture, and were only permitted to use the Norwegian language. This was a ruthless assimilation policy that wiped out our identity and self-perception. In the course of twenty years in the Norwegian education system, I learned neither to read nor write in my mother tongue. The Sámi language and culture were not topics for discussion. It gave one a feeling of emptiness, an inner anonymous space, a feeling of being a stranger in one’s own life. It was only when I grasped my mother tongue myself, and made the first hesitant attempts at writing, that I became able to write poetryWindless Path
Untilled is a place whose structure and character are not revealed exclusively visually; that one has to explore and walk through, much like an exhibition, in order to grasp its individual elements, but that in essence formulates an alternative ontology of the formation of the exhibition: a composting facility is a place for worthless things, which are thrown away and left to themselves, so that they can establish connections to other things and in this way transform into something else, something fertile. “The compost is the place where you throw things that you don’t need that are dead,” says Huyghe. “You don’t display things. You don’t make a mise-en-scène, you don’t design things, you just drop them. And when someone enters that site, things are in themselves, they don’t have a dependence on the person. They are indifferent to the public. You are in a place of indifference. Each thing, a bee, an ant, a plant, a rock, keeps growing or changing.”Thinking the Arrival: Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled and the Ontology of the Exhibition
A metaphor's usefulness lies not in revealing something about reality but in producing a cognitive jolt and thereby affecting beliefs. Yi-Fu Tuan agrees, for as soon as we say "society is like an organism," we then proceed to think explicitly and in detail in what ways society is, and is not, like an organism". On this account metaphor does not contain meaning; it provides a starting point for the construction of meaning. By linking two ideas previously unlinked, metaphors destabilize taken-for-granted realities, bringing about changes in human-environment relationships and social relations.Cyberspace and Virtual Places
As Norbert Wiener suspected as early as 1948, the advent of digital computers—along with concepts such as feedback, selfregulating systems, and prediction—initiated a fundamental rearrangement of temporal structures (1961, 60–94). With the digitalization of further aspects of our lifeworld and with the countless number of apparatuses that can communicate with one another independently and can—the largest and smallest alike—control one another mutually and provide feedback to one another, these particularly cybernetic temporal relations have more or less become absolute. Arguably, they engender an order of time in which modern historicity collapses. One could perhaps call this an “absolutism of the present” (to adapt a phrase by Robert Musil), or, in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s terms, it could be referred to as a “broad present” (2014). The cybernetic chronotope of digital cultures thus raises, yet again, as a topic of discussion the question of historical temporalities.Secrecy, Transparency, and Non-Knowledge
A fresh collation of the rather exiguous manuscript authorities is perhaps required before anything like a definitive text can be provided. Wimmer's Latin translation is not very helpful, since it slurs the difficulties : the Didot edition, in which it appears, is disfigured with numerous misi)rints.
Enquiry Into Plants, and Minor Works on Odours and Weather Signs
In playing around with this form you may further complicate matters by introducing some "noise" so that the given integrals are somewhat inaccurate; an important question is to determine how such perturbations affect the "best guess" according to various reconstruction methods.
Entropy-Related Software
BibliographyA last thought before bringing this section to a close. With the plethora of information available today via the Internet and the fact that more data is added every day, it is easy to fall prey to the erroneous belief that if we just know where to look on the web, the information we seek—*all* the information we seek—is “out there” somewhere. The danger is that this misguided idea will give rise to the ***neverending search***, that is, the conviction that “if I just go to one more website, run one more query, or search one more database I’ll find what I’m looking for.”
Untangling the Web