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The Silence of Gathered Knowledge

Bessemer, in his industrialized innovation of carbon-removal in iron (nothing new to the 800-year antedated Song Dynasty scientists), patented this new economic boon in an explanatory method that could not be reproduced by other steel-makers. What lacked was just what lacks in peer-idealization, or the iconography of scientific communication. Peircean guessing here becomes relevant, as do the memory-tablets of Gilgamesh and the pleas against the reduced recollective-knowledge in documentation for Socrates. As Polanyi would put it, the knowledge is tacit, a silence akin to the purposeful fudges of a Davincian diagram, or the jargon-enriched self-patent in the alchemical description of chemical experiments. Bessemer could not convey the method which - though its overtly ideal form as a scientific process correlates to its pragmatic success when he took up the job - serves as a post-Goethian aesthetized instance of material epistemology, a basic instance of knowledge which Peirce r

The Problem of Growth

Methods to Grow Plants in Your Lungs Inside the germ-pod of the carboniferous structure there is a de-watered mini-me, which needs only moisture and its own stored nutrient (saccharides) to survive a bit in human dirt slidte, revet, ufuldstændige, undersøgelse Betsy: "The proper appreciation of Deleuze is not in his endless series of jargons, his pseudosciences, his self-recursive language of pure trend, but in his work as an important writer (and embodiment) of aesthetics. (Something similar might be said about Baudrillard, though he plumbs the language of poetry to its medial denial (not its Deleuzian proliferation) which allows it to give way to physicality, immediate symbology - bearing its spiritual idea to its root in Bataillean flesh))" Plant: "Our religious formulations have shifted to mediated displacement, focussing on its figurations of sex, violence, and the miracle of an all-too otherwordly science of technique." Betsy: "In converse relation to t

Trinity

A: The muscles of Kay Underwood - a cataplexic - fail to fire when experiencing strong emotion, such as laughter. B: Matt Frerking - a Neuroscientist - is petrified when he has a romantic impulse, or sees others as such. C: The narcoleptics Allison June Burchell and Luis Alfredo Pinilla both woke up on a slab in the morgue one day. For June, this was one of two times. The first, as a teen, was induced by a Hollywood comedy film: having collapsed paralyzed and conscious, she was brought to the hospital and pronounced dead, only to wake up hours later, oddly displaced.

Predicative Dissolutive Ontology and the Gateway to Sensation

ontology ultimately a set of instances – foundationless (albeit in ad hoc extremities) the opening leads to new being which supplants what non-definition attempts to contain in its study it is anything that can be said to be whether "transcendentally" or "immanently" or in any other conceivable manner hegel has a divide between stuff that is (has beingness) and the Geistly being of humans, the strange distinction is married by his pessimism towards a sense meaning of being as a concept alone, as its lack of predicates indicate that nothing at all remains

The Redemption of Action

In Act II, Aaron compares his attachment for Tamora, to whom he is "fetter'd in amorous chains", as one stronger than what binds Prometheus to the Caucasus as his innards are born away. She is like Semiramis, the daughter of Derketo, who was abandoned at birth, after which her mother drowned herself. First fed by doves, then found by Simmas, a sheep-herder, her story is one of millions, the abandoned child of Musean or Oedipal climes. That is, one of millions if she was an abandoned son, which she was not. Her consequent independence mirrored her wit and craft, and with time wed her to the king of Assyria. Her exploits included cross-dressing as her son (after her husband passed) to fight in battle, to gaining a reputation as the originator of both the chastity belt and male castration. At each turn, the pedigree of a female who acts was an ambiguous heritage to assume. For the individuality of action, her reward was the death by her own seed and a mixed reputation

Versions of Basic Materials

http://www.richardsonmag.com/post/128001/post-porn-definition-by-annie-sprinkle/ A Post Porn Modernist makes sexually explicit media that is more arty, conceptual, experimental, political, and/or humorous than mainstream porn imagery. It often has a critical sensibility and while it usually contains some hard-core sex, it is not focused on being “erotic.” Post Porn Modernism is the genre a Post Porn Modernist works in--currently and more popularly called post porn for short. Annie Sprinkle coined the term Post Porn Modernist in 1988 when she needed a title for her first one-woman theater piece. She was moving out of working as a mainstream porn actress and into being a performance artist. She resonated with Dutch artist Wink Van Kempen’s title for his art exhibit in Rotterdam, Porn Modernism (1986). It implied something both arty and pornographic. Sprinkle toured Post Porn Modernist for five years to 16 countries. She also named her autobiographical book Post Porn Modernist. The show,

Physiology: The Collapse of the Rational into Foundational Empiricism

To supporters of the Revolution like Comte, Broussais's work was the first serious philosophical and political challenge to the Restoration. This last piece suggests another possible source of Comte's phrenological knowledge, namely the physician Broussais. comte praises broussais for raising physiology to a positive science (no spiritual categories... all positive/observed) - furthers revolution started by cabanis, advanced by gall and spurzheim comte's very strategic use of broussais against the conservativist cousin extended the positive method (the gaze - it misses senses, but also is an important sense, and engages sensual aspects; but also its power is filled with mythology) of clinical physiology (he does not become influential in the clinical world though - but rather does only through the arguably misinterpretive uptake by comte) to "emotion" and "intellect" "excess or absence of excitation of diverse tissues, above or below the degree tha

Venter and the Epiphany of Abstraction

Craig Venter might be considered one of the exemplary contemporary models of the marriage of capital and scientistic endeavour (which might in turn be traced through euro-capital beginnings and the specific kind of institutional climate (in its inception, the catholic church) against which it worked to define itself - in other words, capitalism in a kind of infancy and science as a practice defined either in conjunction with or in contradistinction with the christian church). In Joseph Jackson's interview at H+ mag he drew a distinction between what he labelled as authentic past citizen scientists consistent with an advocated contemporary view of open science practice - here he names Franklin, Jefferson and Jenner - and what didn't quite fit that bill, or was only partially representative of the citizen scientist, for which he named Thomas Edison. Edison "partially fits the descriptor of Citizen-Scientist" but, on the whole, for Jackson, "his example is not one

the citizen scientist and gentleman scientist (and of course, the punk)

citizen scientists: Thomas Jefferson is the archetype of the gentleman scholar. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals when he got tired of switching between two pairs of glasses and of course, famously flew a kite in a lightning storm to discover the principles of electricity. Edward Jenner discovered inoculation and performed the first vaccination against smallpox. Jenner’s case is especially important as it highlights the power of user innovation. As a country doctor, Jenner observed that milkmaids who interacted with cattle infected with cowpox did not contract smallpox. He then transferred pus from a milkmaid to a young boy, completely protecting him from smallpox. The medical establishment was reluctant to accept the findings of a “lowly” country physician, but eventually Jenner prevailed. Thomas Edison also partially fits the descriptor of Citizen-Scientist but, because he was, frankly, a bit of a bastard (see his feud with Tesla and other abusive monopolistic industrial practices)

The Mediacentric (and its Mock over History or Drowning)

The scam, in its permeation of a given material, reveals the obtuse quality of the medium-in-itself. Its referentiality fails - a crucial element in discarding hypotheses and plumbing the qualities of a given means. Ibn Batuta, the great Muslim traveller, recounts his travels into Hangzhou, China in the midst of the 14th Century. What he sees there is the remarkable aerial travel of an inanimate object, for which he attempts to provide an explanation. The explanation of the action of the relatively inanimate, we will see, was a move it seems only preliterate culture grasped in its immediacy. It was, as the rare intelligence of Ibn Battuta discovered, explained by re-relating that object to a human agent. Pu Songling, in his collection of 18th Century folkloric tales, performs the task not just of a Lonnrot or Grimm brother in collating the rural fancies of purportedly simple folk, but also records some tales which he saw with his own eyes. In this story - this story that is an imm

Science 2.0/3.0

As I've already intimated in my preliminary explorations of literature and art in the web 2.0 environment , the web 2.0 paradigm (or what might simply be called the web or internet paradigm) informs my investigation of an empirical epistemology and its aesthetic and scientistic bifurcations. Thus, just as much as the internet reformulates aesthetic questions and their relation to our ontological framework (regardless of whether we use it or not), so will it reformulate the pragmatic affairs of our scientific endeavours. Insofar as its tools are adopted and employed, it will shake up and reconfigure the current structure of science practice; these changes will, in partial parallel with aesthetic modifications, provide paradigmatic shifts that could facilitate a move more towards what might be outlined as an open and fallible system of practical inquiry. Simultaneously, it could do the opposite, but this only enhances the need for social and critical engagement with the new prob