Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- alchorisma_reader [2018-11-12 13:32] – maja
+++ alchorisma_reader [2018-11-12 14:00] – maja
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-==== Alchorisma Reader ====
+==== Of things written in stone ====
 (foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader -> https://fo.am/events/alchorisma/ )
-<blockquote>
-Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good day. Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. (...) The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually.
-Eventually. (...) Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years.
-—NK Jemisin
-</blockquote>
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 17: / Line 9: @@
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
+Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good day. Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. (...) The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually.
+Eventually. (...) Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years.
+—NK Jemisin
-The Anthropocene marks the fall of humanity from cosmic Big History into terrestrial Deep Time. The Big History narrative is an evolutionary epic, a bio-centric teleological tale of emergence and ascending complexity that culminates in a cosmic anthropic vision of human beings as the universe becoming conscious of itself. By contrast, Deep Time is a rocky ride, a disaster movie, a lithic-centric cyclic story of explosions and extinctions, periods of equilibrium punctuated by catastrophes, which in turn open niches in new fitness landscapes for opportunists to fill.
+</blockquote>
-The geologic record, the rock cycle, the movements of tectonic plates, stratigraphy: these all remind us that the earth is not a ground but a process of ungrounding and regrounding, a layered history of layers punctured by unconformities, gaps and skips in the record.
+<blockquote>
+In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, rather suck on amethyst for the rest of their life than touch organic matter, even when it is as profane as centipede-excrement. Mineral cults evoke in us absolute horror and disgust, suggesting crystal-phobia lurking at the deep of our instincts. Crystalpunks are challenging the basic conditions of their humanity. But at least one standard metaphorical use of the crystal, that of the crystal as object of utopian perfection, as pure geometrical-molecular-ethnicity, in most cases turns out to be a chemical fiction. One of the most interesting qualities of crystals is their ability to encapsulate alien particles. Crystals too produce noise, as one flaw entered during packing distorts tessellation for ever after."
-—Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek
+—The Crystalpunk Manifesto
 </blockquote>
@@ Line 45: / Line 39: @@
 <blockquote>
-In its exile from the Earth's simmering interiority, crustal rock provides a platform and venue for biological life. Living things can approach, engage, even ingest this minority of minerals. Indeed, here rock and life transform each other, generating composite formations—rocks assembled out of once-living bodies, biological bodies composed in part of minerals. But we should not forget that this florid organic-inorganic interface is but a 'gloss on the surface' of our astronomical body, and that the stone that invites life's embrace is a chilled and pallid shadow of its seething progenitors.
+The Anthropocene marks the fall of humanity from cosmic Big History into terrestrial Deep Time. The Big History narrative is an evolutionary epic, a bio-centric teleological tale of emergence and ascending complexity that culminates in a cosmic anthropic vision of human beings as the universe becoming conscious of itself. By contrast, Deep Time is a rocky ride, a disaster movie, a lithic-centric cyclic story of explosions and extinctions, periods of equilibrium punctuated by catastrophes, which in turn open niches in new fitness landscapes for opportunists to fill.
-—Nigel Clark
+The geologic record, the rock cycle, the movements of tectonic plates, stratigraphy: these all remind us that the earth is not a ground but a process of ungrounding and regrounding, a layered history of layers punctured by unconformities, gaps and skips in the record.
+—Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-Rock is passionless. "Stone hearted" and "cold as stone" are as much a part of our lithic vocabulary as various expressions for stony silence. Without a human hand to impress meaning upon it, stone would be blank, impassive, aloof. Immobile and sterile, stones do not do much. Or perhaps our lexicon for stone is impoverished. When observed within their particular and nonhuman duration, stones are forever on the move.
+In its exile from the Earth's simmering interiority, crustal rock provides a platform and venue for biological life. Living things can approach, engage, even ingest this minority of minerals. Indeed, here rock and life transform each other, generating composite formations—rocks assembled out of once-living bodies, biological bodies composed in part of minerals. But we should not forget that this florid organic-inorganic interface is but a 'gloss on the surface' of our astronomical body, and that the stone that invites life's embrace is a chilled and pallid shadow of its seething progenitors.
-—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
+—Nigel Clark
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a "machinic phylum," which they define as "materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression". Because of its constant flow and variation, the machinic phylum is very hard to measure indeed. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the "matter-flow can only be followed"
+Rock is passionless. "Stone hearted" and "cold as stone" are as much a part of our lithic vocabulary as various expressions for stony silence. Without a human hand to impress meaning upon it, stone would be blank, impassive, aloof. Immobile and sterile, stones do not do much. Or perhaps our lexicon for stone is impoverished. When observed within their particular and nonhuman duration, stones are forever on the move.
-—Patricia Pisters
+—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
 </blockquote>
-<blockquote>
-Stones in Chinese gardens or natural settings that are so distinct as to seem out of place are sometimes referred to as Stones That Flew Here. This designation references an obscure Buddhist myth about stones that were magically transported from India to China, landing in unlikely locations where they were incompatible with the local geology. The myth is most likely a way of explaining stones that have been moved by glaciers great distances from their places of origin.
-We extract millions of tons of minerals from the earth annually for the manufacture of computers, mobile phones, television sets and other electronics. When these products become obsolete, they are returned to the earth in the form of e-waste, which often pollutes the earth and can be a significant health hazard for workers involved in processing the e-waste.
-—Richard Turner
-</blockquote>
@@ Line 84: / Line 75: @@
 </blockquote>
-<blockquote>
-In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, rather suck on amethyst for the rest of their life than touch organic matter, even when it is as profane as centipede-excrement. Mineral cults evoke in us absolute horror and disgust, suggesting crystal-phobia lurking at the deep of our instincts. Crystalpunks are challenging the basic conditions of their humanity. But at least one standard metaphorical use of the crystal, that of the crystal as object of utopian perfection, as pure geometrical-molecular-ethnicity, in most cases turns out to be a chemical fiction. One of the most interesting qualities of crystals is their ability to encapsulate alien particles. Crystals too produce noise, as one flaw entered during packing distorts tessellation for ever after."
-—The Crystalpunk Manifesto
-</blockquote>
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 100: / Line 86: @@
 </blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+So, image for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything. It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you possess the philosopher's stone and you were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere you could spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed a piece of information, it would become the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it would talk to you. If you needed to take a shower you could hold it over your head and water would pour out. Now, you see, this is an impossibility. That's right, it's a coincidencia apositorum. It is something that behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other. This sounds like pure pathology in the context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and degradation that is inimical to them, but no, the redemption of spirit and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination.
+—Terence McKenna, Lectures on Alchemy
+</blockquote>
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 115: / Line 108: @@
+<blockquote>
+The response to technology in this period thus confounded familiar oppositions: fetishism and scientific truth; magic and mechanisation' charisma and instrumental rationality. Walter Benjamin's discussion of “the aura” of a work of art offers insight to such doublings. In “The World fo Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he spoke of the aura as a “nearness in a distance,” explaining the concept with reference to a poem of Novalis that described a landscape that seemed to look back at a human spectator. For Benjamin, such an encounter was the paradigmatic experience of aura: “the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between inanimate or natural object and man. In other words, “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return."
+—John Tresch
+</blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-symmetry breaking (algorithmic technique)  To differentiate parts of a structure, such as a graph, which locally look the same to all vertices. Usually implemented with randomization.
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/symmetrybrek.html
+Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a "machinic phylum," which they define as "materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression". Because of its constant flow and variation, the machinic phylum is very hard to measure indeed. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the "matter-flow can only be followed"
-</blockquote>
+—Patricia Pisters
+</blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-antichain (definition) A subset of mutually incomparable elements in a poset.
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/antichain.html
+Despite software's abstraction the geological maintains a particular attraction, as earth substrate, that which surrounds us, our material. Substrate equally presents a set of economic, political and economic consequences which contrast with software's lack of coded visibility, its inevitable "encryption".
+—Martin Howse
 </blockquote>
+A few related algorithms...
 <blockquote>
-Bloom filter (data structure) A data structure with a probabilistic algorithm to quickly test membership in a large set using multiple hash functions into a single array of bits.
+When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following an algorithm. When you put a sharp edge on a piece of flint by executing a precise sequence of strikes with the end of an antler—a key step in making fine stone tools—you’re following an algorithm. Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age.
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bloomFilter.html
+—Christian & Griffiths
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-Simulated annealing (SA) is a probabilistic technique for approximating the global optimum of a given function. Specifically, it is a metaheuristic to approximate global optimization in a large search space for an optimization problem. It is often used when the search space is discrete (e.g., all tours that visit a given set of cities). For problems where finding an approximate global optimum is more important than finding a precise local optimum in a fixed amount of time, simulated annealing may be preferable to alternatives such as gradient descent.
+The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, the last two decades have witnessed a fireworks-style explosion (pun intended) of natural (and sometimes supernatural) heuristics - from Birds and Bees to Zombies and Reincarnation.
-The name and inspiration come from annealing in metallurgy, a technique involving heating and controlled cooling of a material to increase the size of its crystals and reduce their defects. Both are attributes of the material that depend on its thermodynamic free energy. Heating and cooling the material affects both the temperature and the thermodynamic free energy. The simulation of annealing can be used to find an approximation of a global minimum for a function with a large number of variables"
+https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-Hydrological Cycle Algorithm (HCA) simulates nature’s hydrological water cycle. More specically, it involves a collection of water drops passing through different phases such as flow (runoff), evaporation, condensation, and precipitation to generate a solution. It can be considered as a swarm intelligence optimization algorithm for some parts of the cycle when a collection of water drops moves through the search space. But it can also be considered an evolutionary algorithm for other parts of the cycle when information is exchanged and shared. By using the full hydrological water cycle as a conceptual framework, we show that previous water-based algorithms have predominantly only used swarm-like aspects inspired by precipitation and flow. HCA, however, uses all four stages that will form a complete water-based approach to solving optimization problems effciently. In particular, we show that for certain problems HCA leads to improved performance and solution quality.
+symmetry breaking (algorithmic technique)  To differentiate parts of a structure, such as a graph, which locally look the same to all vertices. Usually implemented with randomization.
-https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3828420
+https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/symmetrybrek.html
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, the last two decades have witnessed a fireworks-style explosion (pun intended) of natural (and sometimes supernatural) heuristics - from Birds and Bees to Zombies and Reincarnation.
+antichain (definition) A subset of mutually incomparable elements in a poset.
-https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary
+https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/antichain.html
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-So, image for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything. It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you possess the philosopher's stone and you were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere you could spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed a piece of information, it would become the equivalent of a computer screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it would talk to you. If you needed to take a shower you could hold it over your head and water would pour out. Now, you see, this is an impossibility. That's right, it's a coincidencia apositorum. It is something that behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing damage to the ontological status of one or the other. This sounds like pure pathology in the context of modern thinking because we expect things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and degradation that is inimical to them, but no, the redemption of spirit and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and the interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely commanded in the imagination.
+Bloom filter (data structure) A data structure with a probabilistic algorithm to quickly test membership in a large set using multiple hash functions into a single array of bits.
-—Terence McKenna, Lectures on Alchemy
+https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bloomFilter.html
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following an algorithm. When you put a sharp edge on a piece of flint by executing a precise sequence of strikes with the end of an antler—a key step in making fine stone tools—you’re following an algorithm. Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age.
+Simulated annealing (SA) is a probabilistic technique for approximating the global optimum of a given function. Specifically, it is a metaheuristic to approximate global optimization in a large search space for an optimization problem. It is often used when the search space is discrete (e.g., all tours that visit a given set of cities). For problems where finding an approximate global optimum is more important than finding a precise local optimum in a fixed amount of time, simulated annealing may be preferable to alternatives such as gradient descent.
-—Christian & Griffiths
+The name and inspiration come from annealing in metallurgy, a technique involving heating and controlled cooling of a material to increase the size of its crystals and reduce their defects. Both are attributes of the material that depend on its thermodynamic free energy. Heating and cooling the material affects both the temperature and the thermodynamic free energy. The simulation of annealing can be used to find an approximation of a global minimum for a function with a large number of variables"
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
-The response to technology in this period thus confounded familiar oppositions: fetishism and scientific truth; magic and mechanisation' charisma and instrumental rationality. Walter Benjamin's discussion of “the aura” of a work of art offers insight to such doublings. In “The World fo Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he spoke of the aura as a “nearness in a distance,” explaining the concept with reference to a poem of Novalis that described a landscape that seemed to look back at a human spectator. For Benjamin, such an encounter was the paradigmatic experience of aura: “the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between inanimate or natural object and man. In other words, “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return."
+Hydrological Cycle Algorithm (HCA) simulates nature’s hydrological water cycle. More specically, it involves a collection of water drops passing through different phases such as flow (runoff), evaporation, condensation, and precipitation to generate a solution. It can be considered as a swarm intelligence optimization algorithm for some parts of the cycle when a collection of water drops moves through the search space. But it can also be considered an evolutionary algorithm for other parts of the cycle when information is exchanged and shared. By using the full hydrological water cycle as a conceptual framework, we show that previous water-based algorithms have predominantly only used swarm-like aspects inspired by precipitation and flow. HCA, however, uses all four stages that will form a complete water-based approach to solving optimization problems effciently. In particular, we show that for certain problems HCA leads to improved performance and solution quality.
-—John Tresch
+https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3828420
 </blockquote>
+etc.
@@ Line 192: / Line 201: @@
   * Emergence Magazine Issue No. 3: Technology https://emergencemagazine.org/
   * Harris, P.A. Turner, R., Nocek, A.J. Rock Records, SubStance Volume 47, Number 2, 2018 (Issue 146)
+  * Howse, Martin. [[https://1010.co.uk/org/earthcode.html|Earthcode]]
   * Jemisin, N.K. The Broken Earth Trilogy
   * Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative