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--- alchorisma_reader [2019-08-12 15:10] – nik
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-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."
+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.
 <cite>The Crystalpunk Manifesto</cite>
 </blockquote>
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 Attunement is the feeling of an object's power over me—I am being dragged by its tractor beam into its orbit.
+<cite>Tim Morton</cite>
-—Tim Morton
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
 The necessity of changing methods is all the more obvious when it is a question of finding the explanation of a phenomenon that nature offers in all of its complication. There, where the givens are by their very existence more complicated than the results we seek, direct synthesis becomes inapplicable, and it is necessary to take recourse either to direct analysis if possible, or to indirect synthesis, to feeling around (tâtonnement) and explanatory hypotheses.
-—André-Marie Ampère
+<cite>André-Marie Ampère</cite>
 </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."
+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.
+<cite>John Tresch</cite>
-—John Tresch
 </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.
+<cite>Jeffrey Jerome Cohen</cite>
-—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
 </blockquote>
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 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"
+<cite>Patricia Pisters</cite>
-—Patricia Pisters
 </blockquote>
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 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
+<cite>Martin Howse</cite>
 </blockquote>
 <blockquote>
 A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions.
 The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, but scrutable patterns—Conway's Game of Life frozen inside a crystalline snapshot. So, the stones become a collective unconscious for dynamical systems, an oblique strategy for algopoetic revelry, and a divination system for generative pattern recognition.
-(...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that "Nature's computers are that which they compute" and who maintained that "We cannot read off numbers" from these calculations "because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them". The sealed language of stones...
+"(...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that "Nature's computers are that which they compute" and who maintained that "We cannot read off numbers" from these calculations "because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them". The sealed language of stones...
+<cite>Paul Prudence</cite>
-—Paul Prudence
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 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.
+<cite>https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary</cite>
-https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary
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 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.
+<cite>Christian & Griffiths</cite>
-—Christian & Griffiths
 </blockquote>
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 Since their translation more than a century ago, it has not escaped the notice of esotericists that there is a distinctly alchemical idiom to the Pyramid Texts with their reference to stones, metals and distinct processes of magical transformation. If geo-polymerisation was used in the Old Kingdom's grand, astrotheological building project it certainly becomes a part of the legend that grew over the millennia into what we now call alchemy.
 From earlier cultures Egypt inherited much of its star lore as well as the sanctity of stone. The innovations she brought to these beliefs were dramatically improved forms of masonry and a calendrical and mathematical sophistication that went unequaled for thousands of years. (...) We may speculate here that entangling one's consciousness with certain stars lead to certain 'inspirations/innovations', which improved the technology of consciousness entanglement, which lead to further 'inspirations/innovations'. Think of it like a cosmic version of runaway climate change.
+<cite>Gordon White</cite>
-—Gordon White
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 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.
+<cite>https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/symmetrybrek.html</cite>
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/symmetrybrek.html
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 antichain (definition) A subset of mutually incomparable elements in a poset.
+<cite>https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/antichain.html</cite>
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/antichain.html
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 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.
+<cite>https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bloomFilter.html</cite>
-https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bloomFilter.html
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 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 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"
+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
+<cite>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing</cite>
-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.
+<cite>https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3828420</cite>
-https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3828420
 </blockquote>