a joke says what it has to say… in too few words… It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it.
The most fascinating [question]...is whether we do live in a virtual reality all the time anyway, in some sort of virtual ambiguity...
The only time I [felt] I was not caught in a virtual reality is when I travelled on foot.Werner Herzog
Las certidumbres sólo se alcanzan con los pies. (Certainties are arrived at only on foot).Antonio Porchia
If you should dip your hand in,from ‘At the Fishhouses’ by Elizabeth Bishop
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
I read that estuarine beluga in Canada had been found to be so noxious that their carcasses were classified as toxic waste for disposal. Tissue sampling of sperm whales around the world revealed quantities of cadmium that would kill living cells in a lab. (Cadmium, a compound found in paint and industrial manufacturing, and a by-product of burning fossil fuels, causes metal fume fever, fluid in the lungs, kidney disease and cancer in humans.) The most polluted animals on the face of the earth were thought to be American killer whales in Puget Sound, a place where the starfish had been observed actually melting. The data supported a highly improbable hypothesis, even given the levels of contaminants in the area: that the whales had been chewing batteries or drinking flame retardant to supplement their marine dinners.
One of the most important characteristics distinguishing man from all other forms of nature is his knowledge of transitoriness, of beginning and end, and therefore of the gift of time. In man, transitory life attains its peak of animation, of soul power, so to speak. This does not mean man alone would have a soul. Soul quality pervades all beings. But man’s soul is most awake in his knowledge of the inter-changeability of the terms “existence” and “transitoriness.”Thomas Mann
Certainly, the Anthropocene is rich with new sources of wonder...This autumn I went down the Boulby potash mine, on the north-east coast of England. There immense tunnel networks – or “drift”, in the lexis of mining – extend both inland and offshore. They run up to 1350 metres in depth, and up to 8 kilometres out under the North Sea, following the potash and rock-salt seams laid down during the evaporation of the Zechstein Sea some 200 million years ago.
The mining is done by £3.2 million machines, which – at least to my zoomorphic eye – resemble Komodo dragons, low-slung and sharp-toothed...Years later, when a machine has been exhausted by the demands of its labour,... it is driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned. Slowly, the pressure of depth squeezes the tunnel, and translucent salt flows around the machine, encasing it. Thus we lay down a future fossil of the Anthropocene: a machine-relic in a halite cocoon.Desecration phrasebook Robert Macfarlane
...what if space — perhaps at something like the Planck scale — is just a plain old network, with no explicit quantum amplitudes or anything? It doesn’t sound so impressive or mysterious — but it certainly takes a lot less information to specify such a network: you just have to say which nodes are connected to which other ones.
But how could this be what space is made of? First of all, how could the apparent continuity of space on larger scales emerge? Actually, that’s not very difficult: it can just be a consequence of having lots of nodes and connections. It’s a bit like what happens in a fluid, like water. On a small scale, there are a bunch of discrete molecules bouncing around. But the large-scale effect of all these molecules is to produce what seems to us like a continuous fluid.What is space-time really? Stephen Wolfram
