infinity

Thanks to David Morris,



Zsuzsa Baross
"infinity" is a concept, not an existence, just as zero is not a number….

Sha Xin Wei
Mathematicians treat infinity not as a concept but as (Deleuzian) _problem_
What would be more interesting than the Quanta Magazine's fairly conventional metaphysical subtext is a genealogical and ontogenetic approach to the ever-evolving notion of "the real numbers". (compare this with Bitbol, Petitot et al's project) and even more, to recognize maths as a _speculative_ propositional adventure (cf Roy Wagner, after Whitehead, Stengers)

Barthes neutrality … Laozi 無爲 Wúwèi

To record an exchange from PSF

Muindi: In light of our talk about institutions that play the role of neutral facilitator in geopolitics and individuals who play the role of neutral facilitators in games and play scenarios, I wanted to share with you all some quotations from Roland Barthes' lectures on The Neutral, a book which I am very, very fond of and that I think would make great reading for the PSF group, alongside his lectures on How to Live TogetherI send this because I think that Roland Barthes has a lovely way of talking about neutral party as a passionate figure rather than a dispassionate one. What's more, Barthes phrase "outplay the paradigm" (rather than "playing into the paradigm") could be a very useful phase to empower a facilitator within the context of types of games and play scenarios that we were discussing. (edited) 
Untitled document (3).jpg

In a related timbre, Stefano Franchi, Niklas Damiris, and Helga Wild wrote a deep book on Passivity, which exists only as an unpublished ms.  A source for these diverse Western turns away from modernity: Bathes,  passivity, Heidegger’s standing in reserve, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of constitution is Laozi’s Daodejing.  Here’s an introduction by Steve Coutinho to the daoist concept of wúwèi:

Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism / homes, mated things, and care


A beautiful motivation for portals and sutured spaces, telematically mated objects  — objects that are always so that one is aware of and changes state depending on its siblings' state wherever its siblings may be in the world (thanks to tcp-ip + orc or some other network protocol).  

What of there are things X that always come as a set of initially indiscernibly identical, but responsive siblings,  that cannot be owned separately by just one person?  What if they are designed such that N siblings are always to be adopted by N people?  (Simplest case is twins.)

But more profoundly from the point of view of lived experience, the thing’s state and behavior is then sensitive to its relation not only to you / your home, but to wherever else it's homed as well.      It is crucial NOT to think of these things communicating with each other — NOT transmitting data “from" one “to" the other.   But instead design “the” thing so one relates to it as if it exists in more than one place simultaneously —  in but also not in your home, much like a cat.


Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism / homes, things, and care

A beautiful motivation for portals and sutured spaces, telematically mated objects I’ll say more in my next email, but let me offer you the chance to enjoy Coccia’s graceful and thoughtful essay…

Emanuele Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism … https://fallsemester.org/2020-1/2020/4/17/emanuele-coccia-escaping-the-global-monasticism?fbclid=IwAR3y3dUGCXxy9mHutgEGGmatLLho4D4NT7fmfgQCjvlsIHxNWM5qKuvJ_dE

sutured augmented learning spaces, diagrammatic, 5/8 2 PM MST

See Zimin Proposal (augmented learning environment) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLwEIvjrWbPanZ2ZLKFOBzEvIzyrkTwmkfkARBTyOgQ/edit

Diagrammatic Master Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k0Up-3Q0YvZbbBJwmaeqRN0RfsAJeDwGQzaoAmbn7CM/edit

Possible courses and workshops:

• Digital Culture / Media studies / Computational thinking; Media choreography for non-coders (Leonardo?) • Augmented sutured learning environments + diagrammatic + ecology of things • Place-labs (Dartington, Leonardo) • Alter-Economics: alter-finance (EGS, UNDP) • Emergence, Individuation, Ontogenesis, complex systems (EGS, UNDP)

• Trans-course portfolio

Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-020-09484-y?fbclid=IwAR08IWwX_T0sdEp5SU_DqQgtm16lWjq_OZq2Up3bJH8r2iY0-EZR6-wv0xA

Collective intentionality and the further challenge of collective free improvisation

Abstract

The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as “the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions” that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the “paradoxical” or “twofold” character of “human plurality.” Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus’s Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan.

test data

Technological solutions such as machine learning statistical modeling are limited by the quality of the data in which they are based (a scientific methodological point typically overlooked by programmers and armchair epidemiologists :):) ). and in this case the tables of coronavirus statistics are practically useless without understanding how they were derived.

Numerology : Mistaking a numeral — a squiggle on a screen or a piece of paper — for a fact of the world.

___________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei | skype: shaxinwei | mobile: +1-650-815-9962 | asu.zoom.us/my/shaxinwei
________________________________________________



APR. 4, 2020, AT 1:11 PM

Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless*

*Unless you know something about testing. And even then, it gets complicated.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/?fbclid=IwAR380aOHz1KQp1nrf4e8V2mWzecJ0gzDWblHUiNQfBoD9Xhr4RZeTAoGGiM


If you’re a regular reader of FiveThirtyEight, you’re probably used to looking at data in sports — where basically everything that happens on a basketball court or a baseball diamond is recorded — or in electoral politics, when polls (in theory, anyway) survey a random sample of the population. COVID-19 statistics, especially the number of reported cases, are not at all like that. The data, at best, is highly incomplete, and often the tip of the iceberg for much larger problems. And data on tests and the number of reported cases is highly nonrandom. In many parts of the world today, health authorities are still trying to triage the situation with a limited number of tests available. Their goal in testing is often to allocate scarce medical care to the patients who most need it — rather than to create a comprehensive dataset for epidemiologists and statisticians to study.

Dunne & Raby : What it means to prototype?

Design researchers Dunne & Raby brilliant speculative design research.  Worth careful study.

dunne raby speculative everything

See their work for striking ways to present and work through complex systems
using articulatory techniques that complement (not replace):
equational simulations,
animate objects,
forum theater and movement / somatic.

Bioland


on  prototyping: FICTIONAL FUNCTIONS AND FUNCTIONAL FICTIONS

NOT HERE, NOT NOW (VIDEO), 2015
http://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projects/772/0

PROJECT #26765: FLIRT, 1998-00 (multi-scale)

UMK: LIVES AND LANDSCAPES, 2014

(Thanks to OSK.)

___________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei | skype: shaxinwei | mobile: +1-650-815-9962 | asu.zoom.us/my/shaxinwei
________________________________________________