Sunday, December 28, 2014

Study Notes: December 21-27, 2014: "The Book No One Read"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

Other notes: 

Homework for the future: 

"The Book No One Read"
  • There is only a bit of the article accessible to the public. Sadness. 
  • "In math, a 'singularity' is a function that takes on an infinite value, usually to the detriment of an equation's sense and sensibility. In physics, the term usually refers to a region of infinite density and infinitely curved space, something thought to exist inside black holes and at the very beginning of the Big Bang." 
  • "The late Polish author Stanislaw Lem had written it [Summa Technologiae] in the early 1960s, setting himself the lofty goal of forging a secular counterpart to the 13th-century Summa Theologica." 
  • "To paraphrase Lem himself, the book was an investigation of the thorns of technological roses that had yet to bloom." 
  • "Among the masters of our technological universe gathered there in San Francisco to forge a transhuman future, very few were familiar with the book or, for that matter, with Lem. I felt like a passenger in a car who discovers a blindspot in the central focus of the driver's view." 
  • "Lem's terminology and dense, baroque style is partially to blame [for its obscurity]-- many of his finest points were made in digressive parables, allegories, and footnotes, and he coined his own neologisms for what were, at the time, distinctly over-the-horizon fields. In Lem's lexicon, virtual reality was 'phantomatics,' molecular nanotechnology was 'molectronics,' cognitive enhancement was 'cerebromatics,' and biomimicry and the creation of artificial life was 'imitology.' The path to advanced artificial intelligence he called the 'technoevolution' of 'intellectronics.'"
  • "Much of his best work entailed constructing analyses based on logic with which anyone would agree, then showing how these eminently reasonable premises lead to astonishing conclusions. And the fundamental urtext for all of it, the wellspring from which the remainder of his output flowed, is Summa Technologiae." 

"Study of Leviticus 18-20 'Abomination'"
  • "The background of Leviticus is important to understand. The people are being told not to act like the 'pagans'. This is also the format Paul uses in Romans."
  • "This prohibition of supposedly homosexual acts follows after the prohibition of the idolatrous sexuality of worshiping Molech, whose cult included male cult prostitutes and bestiality. Lev 18 is specifically designed to distinguish the Jews from the pagans who worshiped the multiple gods of fertility cults." 
  • "In Hebrew Jews simply name a book after the first word that appears-- 'V'yirkra'-- which means 'then he spoke' [for Leviticus]."
  • "Since they [the commandments of Sinai] were only commanded to Jews, no one who is not Jewish need worry about obeying them. Judaism holds [that] God taught basic laws to all humanity before Sinai (no murder, rape, etc), but that the more specific laws such as in Leviticus, apply only to Jews." 
  • "Unlike what the English translation implies, toevah [abomination] did not usually signify something intrinsically evil, but something ritually unclean for Jews. Eating pork, shellfish, lobster, eating meat 3 days old, trimming beards, etc is just as much an 'abomination.' It is used throughout the OT to designate those Jewish sins which involve ethnic contamination or idolatry." 
  • "If you draw up a list of all the offenses given in Leviticus for which the death penalty is prescribed, you will find every one of them (with some minor shifts concerning particular forms of sanguinity in incest) is forbidden expressly once again in Deuteronomy. There is one exception. Only one. Of all the capital crimes, only one was so unimportant to God that He didn't bother to bring it up again. Guess which one. :-) However, interestingly enough, Deuteronomy does forbid male sacred prostitution. And Leviticus does not. Do you think, juuust maybe, that God did forbid it in Leviticus? Say, around 20:13? No, if that were true, God would probably have put commands against other kinds of idolatry in the same place. You know: no fortunetelling, no wizardry, no sacrifices to Moloch. Oops, what do you know, those are all right there in the same section of Leviticus too." 
  • "When 1 Kings tells about the sacred male prostitutes being kicked out of the Temple, it repeats not just the word 'toevah', but the assertion which closes chapter 20, that the former peoples were kicked out of the promised land for doing 'all these toevah'. Apparently male sacred prostitution made the writer of Kings think of Leviticus 20, rather than of Deuteronomy. Odd, that." 
  • "We never once see a concrete example of a condemned homosexual act in the old testament [lowercase original] which is not an act of temple prostitution. (unless you argue that the Sodomites must have been frowned on for their homosexuality, since we all know that rape-murder of angels is just fine with God)."
  • "How come you never see Clark Kent and Superman at the same time? How come you never see a condemned homosexual act in the bible without being told that the actors were either idolaters, or actual male temple prostitutes?"
  • "'Comme un fou se croft Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels' (As a fool believes himself to be God, we beleive [sic] ourselves to be mortal)."
  • "The Hebrew theology of women was based on the fact man was made in the image of God and should be treated with the same respect as God. Women, however were created in the image of men, so they were one step further removed from God and not deserving of the same respect... If a man were to treat another man in the same manner [as he could treat a woman] that would be degrading God." 
  • "Almost no early Christian writers appealed to Leviticus as authority against homosexual acts. Those few that did, exercises extreme selectivity in selecting which Levitical laws to say are legitimate for Christians and which are not, whatever suited their personal prejudice. It was clearly not their respect for the law which created their hostility to homosexuality but their hostility to homosexuality which led them to retain a few passages from a law code largely discarded." 
  • "The significance of toevah become clear when your [sic] realize the other Hebrew word 'zimah' could have been used-- if that was what the authors intended. Zimah means, not what is objectionable for religious or cultural reasons, but what is wrong in itself. It means an injustice, a sin. For example, in condemnation of temple prostitutes involving idolatry, 'toevah' is employed (e.g. 1 (3) Kings 14:24), while in prohibitions of prostitution in general a different word 'zimah,' appears (e.g. Lev. 19:29)."
  • "Clearly, then, Leviticus does not say that a man to lie with man is wrong or a sin. Rather, it is a ritual violation, an 'uncleanness'; it is something 'dirty' ritualistically." 
  • "This conclusion finds further support in the Septuagint where the toevah is translated with the Greek word 'bdelygma'. Fully consistent with the Hebrew, the Greek bdelygma means a ritual impurity. Once again, other Greek words were available, like 'anomia', meaning a violation of law or a wrong or a sin." 

"Surviving in an Alien Environment"
  • "Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline [suggested] in their seminal essay Cyborgs and Space (1960) that yoga and hypnosis are forms of cyborgian adaptation that might be used to promote survival in the alien environment of space."
  • "Myra Seaman in her article Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future... [suggested] that medieval people 'examined and extended their selfhood through a blend of the embodied self with something seemingly external to it-- not the products of scientific discovery, but Christ." 
  • I love the way in which Seaman imagines the human-Christ symbiont as a posthuman self avant la lettre: 'a hybrid that is a more developed, more advanced, or more powerful version of the existing self.'"
  • "This suggests to me-- though Seaman does not argue this-- that in becoming one with the non-human prop of Christ, medieval persons extended their capabilities and were in turn profoundly transformed by that encounter, in a manner analogous to modern forms of distributed cognition: their minds, in other words, did not end with their bodies but were imaginatively and practically enmeshed in, and extended by, the external tool of Christ." 
  • "I'm not thinking of the physical ingestion of Christ's body in the Eucharist but rather of the many devotional and meditative practices-- imitatio Christi [imitation of Christ-- the emulation of his suffering, for example], embracing and kissing statues of Christ, meditating on his body-- through which medieval people entered into a deep, complex, and transformative relationship with a non-human external object." 
  • "Wealthy individuals in the middle ages owned portable images of Christ that could travel with them or be worn as jewellery [sic?], so that they could be constantly looked at and touched, much as we carry around our iPhones and laptops. What medieval subjects experienced when they joined themselves to Christ was directly analogous to our sensation of oneness in being closely joined to our technology-- and to our sense of being bereft when that technology goes missing or breaks down because it has, profoundly but imperceptibly, become a part of ourselves. Thinking about the medieval human-Christ symbiosis through a cyborg lens explains not only the intensity of that relationship but also why the separation from Christ is experienced as so agonizing."
  •  "The medieval practices of medi[t]ation on images of the crucified Christ shares some affinities with the dissociative techniques of yoga and hypnosis that Clynes and Kline identify as having the potential to transform the body so that it can function as a 'self-regulating man-machine system' in an alien environment. The medieval world was not of course space and it was not 'non-natural,' but it was nevertheless a harsh environment. The repeated practice of monastic and private devotional meditation enabled an almost automatic (because habitual) uncoupling from the external environment." 
  • "The medieval model offers a way of overcoming the physical limitations of the body through dissociation. To see medieval ascetic practices such as fasting, meditation on the body of Christ, and contemplation as cyborg technologies is to see them differently: not as a rejection of the body and a privileging of the soul/mind, but as highly developed forms of distributed cognition that combine body, mind, and external technologies in a continuous and semi-automatic feedback loop."

"The Sword of Laban as a Symbol of Divine Authority and Kingship"
  • "Many histories and traditions have included weapons as symbols of authority: the spear, bow, axe, and mace... As an object of war and ceremony, the sword came into prominence during the beginning of the second millennium as harder metals enabled the sword to supplant the mace and axe."
  • "As a literary type, some have stated that the sword of Laban was a fixation of the Nephites that took on powerful symbolic importance. That symbolism, though, was of the violent paradigms in the human condition." 
  • "In a survey of historical and mythical literature, two patterns of swords appeared: the kingly and the heroic. Both types function as symbols of divine authority."
  • "The sword of Laban... is comparable with an ancient Near East prototype: the biblical sword of Goliath." 
  • "The kingly pattern of swords was that which established the possessor as the chosen ruler on whom divine kingship was conferred." 
  • "This tripartite responsibility defined 'the king's role in the protection of society as warrior, the guarantor of justice as judge and the right ordering of worship as priest.' As a symbol of power in war, the sword came to be part of the regalia (royal objects) owned by kings that justified their kingship and rule. The sword was passed on to the heir as a transfer of authority, and the giving of a sword to the new king was a widespread feature of coronation ceremonies." 
  • "Societies defined kingship in various ways, but the sword's symbolism in the royal regalia was the temporal representation of divine power in the sovereign." Sword that is melted down and reforged every time that power is passed down. 
  • "In the heroic traditions the sword was preserved or bestowed by deity, often given to a hero for a specific deed. Consequently the hero who possessed the magical and personalized sword had the grace of the gods. In a way similar to kings, epic heroes were given divine authority and power with their swords, and the fortunes of each hero depended upon his sword." 
  • "Using a sword against primordial monsters is a common motif: in this Beowulf has been compared with Nephi. The swords gave heroes power because they represented blades used by the gods and manifested the 'divine cutting power' of deity." 
  • "In Indian mythology, the creature Asi ('The Sword') was created to protect the gods, much like God the Father in Judaeo-Christian tradition protected the garden of Eden with a 'flaming sword.'"
  • "Yahweh himself is known to have a sword that he used in the cosmogonic battle before creation, and his word was frequently equated with a sword." 
  • "Further Christian symbolism suggested that Arthur was made king by Christ's election. Excalibur was a symbol of justice given from God, which justice was the primary function of kingship."
  • "The gods often possessed magical weapons of cutting power, like the blade the Hittite gods had with which they cut heaven and earth asunder." 
  • "In Persian iconography, a common theme depicted the king slaying a standing lion with a sword."
  • "Herodotus reported in the fifth centry B.C. that the Scythians worshipped an ancient iron sword as the image of Ares and sacrificed horses to it. Eight centuries later in the same region the Alani worshipped their war-god as a naked sword stuck in the ground."
  • "No specific mention was made later of the sword of Goliath being used or passed down to subsequent kings or leaders in the Bible. According to legend, David's sword was passed to the next king, his son Solomon. Near his death Solomon took the sword out of the temple and sent it out to sea on a ship he built. The sword was to be found on the ship by one of his descendants and only the rightful heir could then possess it. This sword became known as Excalibur of Holy Grail and Arthurian fame." 
  • "William Hamblin and Brent Merril note that 'the text does not say that Nephi instructed his people how to make swords, but rather that he made the swords himself.' The sword is also only mentioned by the Nephites three times after that, which 'suggests that the weapon was not only well known, but also unique, wielded by kings, with no comparable weapon being used by others.' In this sense, the sword was strictly part of the regalia and was not used or handled by any individuals beside the king."
  • "It was also common in other cultures that the regalia was 'brought forth in times of publci disaster for the purpose of staying the evil.'"
  • "There seems to be a strong connection between the records and a sword that extended from Book of Mormon times to the latter days. There are some interesting passages in the journal of L. John Nuttal, who worked with Brigham Young in the Saint George Temple. In January 1877 from the 18th to the 26th he mentioned the use of a sword while performing ordinances in the temple... Each mention was in conjunction with doing sealings and endowments for that day, and the sword is mentioned only with the office of recorder."

"The Horizontal and Vertical Axes of Storytelling"
  • "The horizontal axis contains some of the following storytelling elements
    • "-Incident and event
    • "-Character action in reaction to incident and event
    • "-Plot development
    • "-Narrative structure 
    • "-Pace
    • "-Build-up of physical excitement and tension
    • "-Plot turning points
    • "-Breather scenes
    • "-Act and story climaxes
    • "-Denouement
    • "-Character development
  • "The vertical axis includes the following storytelling elements
    • "-Personal meaning and resonance
    • "-connection
    • "-Questions of/to character interiority, e.g: -- why did he/she react that way, where does that reaction come from, what was its genesis -- a moment in their past? How does/will that moment and its fallout affect her?
    • "-Subtext
    • "-Emotional backstory
    • "-Psychological backstory
    • "-Metaphorical significance
    • "-Symbolism and motif
    • "-Denouement
    • "-Character development
  • "I have a recommendation for writers who find themselves discovering such [stop-and-ponder] moments in their stories.
    • "Stop
    • "Take stock.
    • "Why/how is this significant? Is it, or how can it be metaphoric of a situation or (interior) struggle the character is having?
  • Kurt Vonnegut: "Writing is like crawling through a dark tunnel on your hands and knees with a crayon in your mouth." 
  • "In Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things... there is a moment when the adult character discovers a Mickey Mouse watch she'd dropped in the garden when a child. The author imbues that watch with metaphoric power, to the point it becomes a motif. At first glance it is a small moment, and I've always wondered at what point in the gestation of the story Mickey Mouse with his hands spread (forever) at ten-minutes-to-two appeared." 
  • "If you hasten to go past or around... to get going or keep going on the horizontal axis, you run the risk of not only passing the lichen by without a second glance, but doing the same to the deeper aspects of your story." 

"The Remarkable Queerness of Shinji Ikari"
  • "One of the most obvious examples of this [disconnect from 'just about everything the text attempts to establish thematically'] comes from the heavy sexualization of the two teenage female pilots that the fandom-- and, frustratingly, the marketing team-- participates in, despite the fact that the show goes to great lengths to deconstruct everything from harem anime tropes to the specific character archetypes of those characters to the idea of fanservice in general. The most fanservicey scenes are frequently profoundly uncomfortable, if not outright nightmarishly surreal." 
  • "According to fan lore, End of Evangelion, the film that acts as the conclusion to the original series, was deliberately dark, brutal, incomprehensible, and full of psychosexual revulsion directed squarely at the protagonist because creator Hideaki Anno was so outraged and disgusted with the Otaku misreading of the film."
  • "Even the baseline story of Eva is barely comprehensible on its own merits without heavy rewatching and the aid of fan wikis." 
  • Here the AT Field, as the Absolute Terror Field, is described as "the Light of the Soul that differentiates organizations from each other through, essentially, fear of being wholly connected to another being." Which is interesting, since most discussions on that aspect of the AT Field go with defining it as the Absolute Territory Field. 
  • A line describing a very particular scene from Eva, but which could describe many more: "It's somewhere between extremely touching and extremely disturbing." 
  • "Look, End of Evangelion is a very, very weird movie, ok? There are Reasons why the fanbase is willing to believe that it was created specifically to troll them." 
  • "All of this is gay as hell and it blows my mind that so many fans apparently can't deal with what isn't even subtext at this point but straight up 100% text. Like they could literally have shown Shinji and Kaworu boning and it both would not be that much more obvious than what they did show, and I am convinced Eva fans would still find some way to make that just a sign of 'close friendship' or something." 
  • "The reason why the rhetoric surrounding this issue is so disturbing to me is because it mirrors word for word discourse used to deny queer identities in real life. For example, one of the most prominent descriptions, one that I saw over and over again from fans, was that Shinji was 'just confused' about his feelings for Kaworu." 
  • "It's particularly frustrating in the case of an apparently bisexual male character because bisexuality and male bisexuality in particular, is so highly stigmatized not just in heteronormative dominant culture but in the ostensibly more inclusive queer culture as well. Bisexuals are... simply the transitional phase, the chrysalis period, before a formerly straight person emerges as a beautiful fully gay butterfly." 
  • "The stunning irony of it all is that these instances of casual homophobia simply reveal the eggshell fragility of masculinity that in many ways Eva ultimately skewers. And that, I think, is what sets this narrative apart from other instances of canonical queerness: the queer relationship in question is so important, and so revealing of the protagonist's character, that to remove it is to gut the thematic arc." 
  • "If there's one overarching point Eva has about relationships, it's that queer or het, EVERYONE is pretty messed up. I mean one of the central recurring ideas [to the point that it is the title of an episode] is the Hedgehog's Dilemma, where, like hedgehogs, the closer people get to one another, the more they hurt each other." 
  • "When I point out that Shinji and Kaworu are actually kind of terrible for each other, then, you have to understand that it doesn't undermine the importance of actually acknowledging their fundamental queerness and neither does it indicate homophobia on the show's part, coming, as it does, in the context of a whole raft of similarly warped and unhealthy relationships." 
  • "What is it that makes their relationship so unhealthy? Uh, how about the fact that it ends with Shinji squishing Kaworu with his giant robot?"
  • "The deeper problem here is that Kaworu sets himself up to be squashed, and behaves like being squashed is a totally reasonable thing to allow in a relationship based on mutual love. And that reveals a deeper problem: Shinji falls in love with Kaworu because Kaworu loves him unconditionally to the point of self-destruction. Shinji is an endless sucking void of neediness, and he frequently seems totally incapable of seeing that other people have needs beyond his emotional fulfillment... He simply instrumentalizes whatever character is nearby. And Kaworu is the perfect object-- the perfect objectified being-- for that instrumentalization, because he is almost literally a blank piece of paper ready for Shinji to inscribe upon him whatever he needs."
  • "In the series, when he dies, it's clear that Shinji does what emotionally unstable teenagers do with their exes: he idealizes the everloving crap out of Kaworu, elevating him to a status of absolute goodness and using Kaworu's death to further his own slide into total self-loathing."
  • "Please try to at least be consistent with your misreadings instead of just diving straight into them murky oceans of awkwardly half-admitted homophobia and adolescent male anxiety." 
  • Joeinformatico: "Kaworu is the romanization that Gainax chose to use. According to this analysis, it's supposedly a much older form of Japanese, and might be a reference to The Tale of Genji. 'Kaworu' has the added bonus of being a sexually-ambiguous name." 
  • Soren Lundi: "I always had the impression that Kaworu was specifically designed to appeal to Shinji/Shinji's unconscious desires. When he say he was made to meet Shinji he's being totally literal. He's a bio-engineered honey-trap kaiju spy who fails his mission after falling in love with the mark. The other Angels don't appear to have gender (which makes sense biblically), so Kaworu's gender is just a part of his human disguise." 

"Tony Stark in the Integrated Circuit"
  • "Iron Man-- or later, the Iron Men-- is/are an extension of Tony's being. They are a prosthetic not in the sense that they restore him to some idealized 'normal' human functionality but in the sense that they are a tool that acts as an extension of the human body in order to facilitate a human's aims."
  • "It should be obvious that Tony Stark is a cyborg, though not a conventional one. His most obvious cybernetic feature is the power core embedded in his chest, but his suit, in the way it extends both his body and will, is also a part of his cybernetic being. The films consistently portray the Suit as a second self for Tony, an eventually unlimited tangle of extra limbs that transform his body into a fluidly bounded and ambiguous mass." 
  • "Why am I bringing all this obvious stuff up? Well, because these concepts aren't just of interest to transhumanists and science fiction fans, they're also of interest to a particular strand of contemporary critical theory-- Cyborg Feminism. And the films don't just have a veneer of cyberization, they also can serve as an access point to these ideas and the deconstructive power they level at the existing power structures of the world." 
  • "One of the keys to understanding Cyborg Feminism is understanding that the Cyborg is not necessarily literal (although it certainly can be!) but stands as a symbol of hybridized, complex, and fluid identities." 
  • "Haraway starts out [her essay, A Cyborg Manifesto]... by describing her work as faithful to Marxist Feminism in the way that blasphemy is faithful-- as a heretical reaction rather than an apostatic disavowal of the tradition. And that's just the beginning of the mindbending 'serious play' that Haraway is engaged in." 
  • "For Haraway, the Cyborg is not just a literal fusion of human and machine, but a metaphorical description of those who resist the Informatics of Domination... by way of appropriation, disruption, perversity, deconstruction, and a radical disregard for essential identities. See, Haraway is reacting against the feminism of the 1970s here and the notion of Women as having fundamental qualities that unite them against Men."
  • "Chela Sandoval, in expanding on Haraway's work, similarly is interested in the possibility of creating a politics that relies less on fundamental identities-- essential notions of what it means to be a woman-- and more on broad affinity-based coalitions between groups in order to resist power structures. This is part of the move in Third Wave Feminism to dismantle the White Cishet woman as the truest representation of femininity and the feminist cause."
  • "The Cyborg enters into this in part because the Cyborg is a powerful symbol of hybridity. In the Cyborg, the binary between Man and Machine is disrupted. On blends into the other fluidly; you can't sever one from the other without inflicting a psychic and physical wound onto the cyberized individual. And for Haraway, the Cyborg is the state of existence in which we are already embedded, and which Marxist Feminism must manipulate in order to resist." 
  • Haraway: "The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically." 
  • "Haraway isn't a post-feminist and she doesn't deny the importance of resistance. But there's no essential Female Experience to rely on in order to build coalitions, because power structures impact different people in vastly different ways based on the multiple identities of which they are a part."
  • "The Iron Man identity is less dependent upon the wearer than Tony's assertion of identity suggest. And, of course, through the films Tony is not wearing Iron Man alone. He is constantly assisted by Jarvis, and the reality of whether the suit is 'inhabited' by Tony, Jarvis, or some combination shifts from scene to scene." 
  • "Just because something deals with weird sexual metaphors doesn't make it Freudian. The Surrealists, for example, were interested in the Unconscious but Freud reportedly once told Dali that he didn't find the artist's work a good representation of that concept, and their methodologies certainly went into far stranger realms than Freud himself necessarily ventured." 
  • "We are witnessing the alpha male Tony Stark transformed into a vulnerable but also disturbingly alien entity... Like, there's no way around it-- there's a weird psychosexual dimension to this that draws upon traditional conceptions of male and female sex roles... Tony Stark in this scene becomes, basically, a deconstructive entity. In this scene, boundaries that the film has heretofore asserted dramatically-- masculine/feminine most prominently-- are not simply flipped by confused as different conflicting signifiers come into play." 
  • "The third Iron Man film hinges upon the understanding that the simple East/West division of the previous films (already suggested as false, in characters Obadiah and Justin Hammer) is false and ultimately a tool of domination. The vaguely Eastern threat The Mandarin is revealed to be a construct of decidedly Western forces, the terrorist threat collapsing into the self-generated perpetual motion machine that is the War On Terror."
  • "One of the recurring story beats involves Tony Stark surrendering this extension of his being to another person. This occurs most notably when, during the Christmas attack on his home, he casts the suit outward from himself and relinquishes control of this part of his body to Pepper... While Tony ultimately has the power to reclaim his control, for this moment, and for other moments in the film, Pepper commands what elsewhere exists as an extension of Tony."
  • "The Iron Man suits in the climax to the final movie serve as a reflection of Tony's fractured psychology and his fears, but they also serve as a networked, destabilized, and distributed identity that Tony can put on or take off at will. The Iron Man suits enable Tony to achieve in physical matter the kind of fluidity of self that Cyberspace has long promised. And it is that fluidity of identity that ultimately allows Tony and Pepper to triumph over Killian. While Killian is a transhuman entity possessing incredible powers of regeneration, he ultimately is reliant upon a monadic identity-- 'I AM the Mandarin!' he shouts during the final confrontation. 'No more masks!' For Killian, his own body stripped down to its Extremis core, and Tony stripped of his Iron Man suit, represent 'true' forms that exist beneath the lies and parallel identities. But he is defeated by a one-two punch from the Iron Man distributed identity network." 
  • "Tony Stark entombs Killian in the suit that he's spent the most time interacting with as an alternate identity and sacrifices the prodigal son in an act of symbolic suicide in order to defeat Killian. An entire sequence of Tony shedding and fluidly replacing skins concludes with him commanding the destruction of one extension of himself when it becomes more strategically viable to lose it. His identity has become a matter not of definitive form but of strategic use, a self selected based on his positionality and the positionality of the entities he interacts with. (This strategic fluidity parallels the strategic use of language patterns in racial contexts, the strategic fluid movement in and out of the closet depending on the relative safety of particular spaces, and so on-- the fluidity of identity is already a mode of resistance...)" 
  • "First of all, Pepper's survival and ability to defeat Killian comes from Killian's own forced medical procedure inflicted upon her. She is literally here turning the tool of oppression against her oppressor. Furthermore, the way she defeats him is fundamentally predicated on identity... She first deconstructs the object bent on destroying her, and then appropriates it, makes this separate identity a part of herself, in order to blow the true-identity-asserting Killian up." 
  • "Tony Stark is Iron Man, but is Iron Man Tony Stark, or has Iron Man become such a distributed identity that many entities could eventually claim the title...? From this perspective, the multiversal, fluid, costumed nature of Superhero Comics in general becomes a powerful representation of Cyborg identities and the potential space for semiotic resistance."
  • "Science is late to the party, but it's on the doorstep of the right house finally and it's rapidly discovering what Theory has asserted for a long time: binary identities are bullshit." 
  • "From the perspective of Transhumanism as a whole the end of the film is remarkably well considered. Tony Stark does not reject science wholly but comes to recognize that drive to create without a true ethical framework... is untenable."
  • "Cyborg Feminism is not post-identity, and Tony Stark is still very much a white cishet rich able-bodied American man, and I think there is a recognition, even within Cyborg Feminism, that while the ultimate aim of the project is to dismantle structures, there are still folks on the top of the social heap who have access to greater powers of speech than others. There is a danger in Tony Stark, in part because of his privileged position, that he might become himself a totalizing essentializing figure of the True Cyborg Experience when the technologies of Cyborg Feminism may be mobilized in far different ways by different individuals and groups."
  • "It is not, after all, that the product must be perfect. The Cyborg is not innocent, it is not unproblematic, but it is not questing after a primordial pre-Fall Eden. It makes use of the tools that are available to it. So do I. So do we all." 

"Stark Modernism"
  • "It's difficult not to perceive, in Giacometti's works from this period ['the latter part of his career'], the long shadows of those caught in the holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the firestorm at Dresden. They are just on the verge of abstraction, forms of careful if roughly rendered geometry, Giacometti revealing fundamental underlying forms by literally ripping clay off of the wire frames of his models to expose the ragged armature. This is humanity stripped horribly naked." 
  • "It's clear that the filmmakers have done their homework on these pieces: some of the artists (Pollock) are (tragically) an enduring part of the popular art world mythos but Giacometti isn't as well known, nor are some of the other artists that are name dropped in the films. What's the point of going to the effort to include these works? Why have recurring scenes in the films dealing with art?" 
  • "Let me take some time out here to ramble a bit about Pollock. Pollock is very much a product of a particular kind of mythmaking that's not all that uncommon in the modern and contemporary art scene... Pollock's mythology is particularly American and is inextricable from the post-war rise of American Abstract Expressionism as a major cultural power. The canvases were colossal, the art was masculine and powerful, there was a sense of almost mystic energy to the works of Pollock in particular... But more than that, the Pollock here is an empty vessel, a signifier for the audience, above all, of money and of an aesthetic world that they have limited access to."
  • "This is fun stuff because it's a fairly easy way for the film makers to convey the fact that Tony is a superficial toolbag. It's not just that Tony Stark can buy modern art, he can buy it without even understanding a damn thing about what he's buying. And he can also give it away without a thought." 
  • "We have Pepper as the intellectual core of their operation, we have Tony oblivious to the real value of things, prone to making snap decisions for emotional reasons, and we have art functioning as an empty signifier of wealth, an object that is a void vessel for meaning." 
  • "The optimistic symbolism might not be the full story. The scene comes in the context of Tony Stark's increasingly erratic behavior as his body is slowly poisoned by the technology keeping him alive, and is surrounded by indications that he doesn't understand or have command of the symbolic meanings of the works he buys and sells." 
  • "The lesson of the film [Exit Through The Gift Shop] seems to be that the art world can quickly adopt, consecrate, and corrupt nearly anything, no matter how illegal, and the various lawsuits and ethical questions surrounding Fairey (some launched by Fairey himself at other artists for appropriating his work in the same way that he appropriated the works of others!) seem to bear out that dour observation."
  • "There's something hollow about Fairey's work, particularly when you consider his penchant for appropriating not corporate symbols but symbols of resistance from less fortunate leftist artists." 
  • "Someone who makes art for the Obama campaign is barely countercultural at best. And Iron Man 2 certainly seems somewhat cynical about the pop art stylings of Fairey, associating it not with Pepper's calculating eye but with Tony's blithely acquisitive self-promotion." 
  • "Pepper, in the films, for all her knowledge of art history, never speaks of art for its own sake but always in terms of value, buying, selling, collecting. Both characters seem to me sides of the same coin: part of a consumption culture that manipulates art objects as symbols and investments (which are, of course, also simply empty symbolic vessels)."
  • "Art represents, in the films, not a source of enlightenment or relief by an empty ego mirror, reflecting wealth and fame back at the viewer. They are mirrors that reflect only the already gilded." 
  • "I think these scenes are therefore not just a way of glimpsing Tony's internal world and his interactions with Pepper, or a way of reflecting on the symbolic content of the films, but a window into the place of contemporary art in our culture. And if this is an accurate bellweather, wow, art isn't faring so great in our day and age. And if it isn't, well, who's to blame-- the foolish Tony Stark? The knowledgeable but coldly calculating Pepper? Or the system whereby Pollock and Rothko and Fairey and Newman and Lichtenstein and Koons and even Picasso, baby, are homogenized and converted into the same broad High Culture, inaccessible to the lower classes, misunderstood by the wealthy who own them, unimpeachable by reputation and canonization? In these films, art has already been abstracted into myth. It's not wonder that it should be a symbol only of that which has been rendered untouchable, just like the superrich that wreck so much havoc on the world." 

"The Thingiverse"
  • Words like "the" are frequently missing from this article.
  • "Sharing the models [for 3D Printing] is said to be common among the community members."
  • "Some say that 'Thingiverse is built on the concept of giving back. In other words, as a responsible community member, you should not only download models but also upload and share your creations to repay the community."
  • "Nearly 42% of the thingiverse.com 3D models analysed were private." 
  • "The popularity of 'customized' tag might indicate high rate of derived work... Also the usage of parametric indicates that some 3d [sic] models are intended to be scaled easily... It seems that some of [the] common tags are 'invented' from tools with which [the] model is created, name of printer it's part of or targeted at." 

"The Practical Guide to the Future of Medicine"
  • "I see enormous technological changes heading our way. If they hit us unprepared, which we are now, they will wash away the medical system we know and leave it a purely technology-based service without personal interaction." 
  • "By playing games on Lumosity.com, our memory, flexibility, attention, and focus can be improved." 
  • "The smartphone application 'Zombies, Run!' requires the runner to pick up virtual supplies and escape from virtual zombie hordes making exercise more motivated." 
  • "TellSpec is a hand-held device designed to determine what macronutrients or specific ingredients the food contains." 
  • "Dr. Rafael Grossman became the first surgeon to demonstrate the use of Google Glass during a live surgical procedure." 
  • "Eyes-On Glasses uses imaging technology to find the location of the most suitable vein." 
  • "An Autonomous remote-presence robot called RP-VITA is used in monitoring surgical patients before, during, and after their operations." 
  • "In its 2014 e-health report Deloitte called e-visits the house calls of the 21st century." 
  • "Video consultation is becoming a routine part of care offered by the Stanford Hospital & Clinics." 
  • "The 'Healing Blade' card game takes medical students into a world of sorcery and creatures where real-world knowledge of infectious diseases and therapeutics play a pivotal role in the winning strategy." 
  • "In underdeveloped regions, surgical robots could be deployed so that operations are performed by surgeons who control the robots from thousands of kilometers." 
  • "Medical drones could deliver supplies and drugs to conventionally unreachable areas." 
  • "In years, we will stop talking about personalized medicine as it will no longer be anything special." 
  • "The smart bra has successfully been tested in over 500 breast cancer patients detecting the disease." 
  • "Biomaterials such as liver tissue and skin have been successfully printed out." 
  • "In 2014 scientists succeeded in regenerating a living organ, the thymus, which produces immune cells."
  • "BioCurious, a hackerspace for biotech, opened with the mission statement that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone." 
  • "Theranos develops a radical blood-testing service that requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood to perform hundreds of lab tests from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses." 
  • "Bespoke Innovations went further in customization to make beautifully designed prosthetics based on the patient's needs and personality." 
  • "HumMod is a simulation system that provides a top-down model of human physiology from organs to hormones." 
  • "Tiny nanorobots in our bloodstream could detect diseases and send alerts to our smartphones or digital contact lenses before disease could develop in our body." 
  • "Japanese scientists could map one second's worth of activity in the human brain with K computer, the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world." 
  • "Dr. Kevin Warwick managed to control machines and communicate with others using only his thoughts with a cutting-edge neural implant." 
  • "In 2016, Zurich, Switzerland will host the first championship sports event under the name Cybathlon for parathletes using high-tech prostheses, exoskeletons, and other robotic and assistive devices." 
  • "Chris Dancy is usually referred to as the world's most connected man. He has between 300 and 700 systems running and collecting real-time data about his life at any given time." 


"Controlling Genes With Your Thoughts"
  • "ETH researchers led by Professor Martin Fussenegger have developed the first gene network to be operated via brainwaves. Depending on the user's thoughts, it can produce various amounts of a desired molecule."
  • "A novel gene regulation method that enables thought-specific brainwaves to control the conversion of genes into proteins-- called gene expression in technical terms." 
  • "The system, which the Basel-based bioengineers recently presented in the journal Nature Communications, also makes use of an EEG headset. The recorded brainwaves are analysed and wirelessly transmitted via Bluetooth to a controller, which in turn controls a field generator that generates an electromagnetic field, this supplies an implant with an induction current. A light then literally goes on in the implant: an integrated LED lamp that emits light in the near-infrared range turns on and illuminates a culture chamber containing genetically modified cells. When the near-infrared light illuminates the cells, they start to produce the desired protein." 

"The Fermi Paradox..."
  • "Sagan and Newman... argue that any presumably wise and cautious civilization would never develop SRPs because such machines would pose an existential risk to the original civilization. The concern is that the probes may undergo a mutation which permits and motivates them to either wipe out the homeworld or overcome any reasonable limit on their reproduction rate, in effect becoming a technological cancer that converts every last ounce of matter in the galaxy into SRPs..."
  • "Tipler conceded the danger of mutation and unintended behavior or reproduction. He pointed out that unlike biology, which is subject only to the limitations imposed by unintentional and unconscious evolution, machines designed with foresight and intelligent engineering may incorporate fundamental restrictions on erroneous reproduction. Such restrictions could be so deeply ingrained as to render any mutated individual a still-birth (a simple checksum might suffice). We know that engineering can achieve remarkably high data integrity rates." 
  • "Thus, we can speak of a predator shadow, a region of the galaxy which is not reached by that particular ETI civilization... Furthermore, if there are a sufficient number of independent predatory mutation sites surrounding the homeworld, they may even bound the nonmutated probes' expansion."
  • "Each new colony is created in one of two states: colonizing or noncolonizing, the reason being that while some cultures opt toward exploration and expansion, others develop nonexpansionist values and display minimal interstellar reach." 
  • "Even for P > P, in which the percolation model permits civilizations to grow indefinitely, thus spanning the galaxy, there still occur inverted shells whose surfaces comprise solely of noncolonizing colonies such that their interior regions are never visited." 
  • "McInnes shows that an expanding sphere of colonization cannot expand fast enough to avoid complete societal collapse due to exponential population growth and increasing population density... Furthermore, after such a crash, the society may be so impoverished of resources that it is forever blocked from making a second attempt." 
  • "McInnes calls this sphere the light cage. Assuming 1% annual growth and a starting sphere the size of Earth, he determines that the light cage is at a 300ly (light-years) radius and that the time to reach the light cage is 8000 years... If we assume a maximum flight speed of 0.1cm a common estimate for fusion-powered starships such as Daedalus... which yields voyages to nearby stars on the order of decades, and if we assume a regeneration period of a few decades-- and therefore comparable to the duration of the voyages themselves-- then we estimate a more realistic maximum expansion velocity to be ~0.5c. When applied to McInnes' equations, this velocity reveals a far more realistic cage of a mere 15ly, and an associated saturation rate of 7000 years... If we briefly consider a maximum expansion velocity of .01c, we derive a cage of only 3ly." 
  • Considering that there are only 52 stars with 15ly of Earth (and non within 3ly!), and that only some fairly small subset will support habitation, this does not provide us with very many systems to colonize before we implode in a population density catastrophe. More crucially, 15ly probably lies within the single-voyage horizon, which implies that early waves of colonization may fill the cage all at once as opposed to diffusing radially. In other words, according to light cage theory, interstellar travel hardly provides any population relief at all, right from the beginning." 
  • "Galactic civilization is loosely like an expanding sphere, but more precisely it is like traversal of a rooted tree (a graph), where the root is the homeworld, vertices are solar systems, and labeled edges connect stars whose distances are below a maximum traversal threshold with the labels indicating interstellar distances (and associated travel times). 
  • "He [McInnes] proposes the example of a civilization which permits exponential growth at its frontier but enforces logistic growth wherever resource limits are reached, i.e., deeper within the sphere." 
  • "Haqq-Misra and Baum propose that such [quickly-expanding] civilizations may ubiquitously burn out, leaving only the slower civilizations." 
  • "The arrival of unwelcome colonists is admittedly difficult for stellar societies to contend with because presumably magnanimous cultures cannot simply turn interstellar immigrants away; they will surely die after such a long trip if support is not provided very quickly." 
  • "The best theory yet offered on the Fermi Paradox which permits intragalactic ETI, namely that exploration probes may currently reside in our solar system, yet undiscovered."

"The Stars Are Wrong"
  • "Lovecraft's horror is not an inexhaustible resource when the creators tapping into it are using it without being conscious of the underlying power of the work." 
  • "What makes Lovecraft so fundamentally compelling is the cosmic scope of his horror. There's a kind of earth gutsyness to a lot of modern interpretations of Lovecraft that simply don't jive with what makes his work so fascinating. And while I'm always in favor of reinterpretation, here it strikes me as fundamentally missing the point." 
  • "There is a deep loathing that comes from the image of the fungal, alien Mi-Go wearing their de-brained human minions as suits while attempting to convert further followers." 
  • "The emphasis here, and I think it's a subtle but important one, is not upon the physical trauma endured but the philosophical and existential trauma, if that makes sense... And that fundamentally existential terror is lost when we focus on fish rape." 
  • "Basically, even if you're consciously reinterpreting the material, if you're discarding the core elements of the premise to do so, you've undermined your own purpose." 
  • "Although Lovecraft is constantly captivated by the motif of incomprehensible forces on the edge of our awareness, that ultimately are outside our control, a motif is not a theme on its own, it's only a suggestion. You can't have a theme of 'Justice,' for example-- that's too broad and simplified. But if you expand that into a theme of the struggle between the craving for justice and the need for certainty that paralyzes a man into inaction... well, you get Hamlet, don't you?"
  • "Some of Lovecraft's best material uses those sorts of closed sets to put the reader on edge as the world falls apart and disintegrates into incomprehensible hostility."
  • "The problem is, people look at Cthulhu and think Lovecraft is scary because Cthulhu is scary. And it's actually the other way around. Lovecraft makes Innsmouth, Cthulhu, Dagon, &c. scary because Lovecraft is terrified of the Sea, and he conveys that terror and revulsion constantly in his stories. But they only work because Lovecraft is capable of convincing us that the sea itself, the benthic deep from whence Cthulhu rises, is truly something to fear... So, here's my final recommendation. Stop designing Lovecraftian monsters. Design monsters that fit what YOU think is fundamentally scary."
  • "Lovecraft's world is a dark and terrifying one, and there's something to be said for the discovery of that world in obscurity." 
  • "So, for now, let's start exploring other avenues. Let's explore where Evangelion, or Fuseli, or Redon-- or the countless other myths and stories and paintings that now lay untouched by culture-- can take us." 
  • Matti: "It also tells a tale that Lovecraft didn't want his creatures to be painted." Sam Keeper: "Did he really not want his works illustrated? That's fascinating." Indeed.
  • MrNiceGuy: "Lovecraft has had several waves of resurgence since I first read the stories, although not quite like the current craze. But that is more of a function of websites like Etsy, the Maker community and the ease of creating multimedia with worldwide distribution."

"AnimalTech"
  • "In the 1960s conservationists fitted endangered species such as gorillas, snow leopards or elephants with radio tracking collars. As research methods improve, laboratory animals are often fitted with wearable monitoring devices rather than more invasive implanted devices." 
  • "Military or police dogs wear devices that give their handlers a 'dogs-eye-view' [sic] of the areas their animals are patrolling and are even able to transmit commands to the animals." 
  • "Livestock often wear devices to record their movements and activity as a way of monitoring hormonal cycles or to spot the early signs of possible health problems." 
  • "Retrieva is a commercial GPS collar which track's a dog's location, trajectory and speed in real time, data this is transmitted to a web or mobile phone. It allows the dog's guardian to set up virtual 'fences' which alert them if the dog crosses the boundaries." 
  • "Marketed as a health monitor, Whistle is a light-weight device which uses accelerometer data to recognize patterns in a dog's activity, for use by the owner or vet." 
  • "Voyce uses radio frequencies to detect vital signs such as heart-rate and respiration, which together with activity patterns and other information help the dog's guardian and vet understand and improve the animal's health. The system track the dog's progress, sends the guardian relevant information and even rates the guardian's care-taking performance." 
  • "NoMoreWoof... is a canine EEG headset that monitors brain signals and provides suggestions in real time of what they might represent the dog is feeling." 

Miscellany
  • Michael Peppard: “It is deeply ironic, paradoxical and troubling," he says, "that those who worship Jesus Christ, who was tortured and executed by state power, would support the torture of anyone."
  • "10 Space Myths We Need To Stop Believing": "If you're sure that you've seen NASA photographs or similar images and the Sun was yellow there, too, you might actually be right. This image we have of a yellow Sun is so prevalent that sometimes astronomers will actually modify the color of their pictures in order to make them more recognizable. However, the real color of the Sun is white." 
  • "Hack Biology, Body, and Music": "For the past two winters, CDM has joined with Berlin's CTM Festival to invite musical participants to grow beyond themselves. Working in freshly-composed collaborations, they've been new performances in a matter of days, then presented them to the world-- as of last year, in a public, live show. This year, they will work even more deeply inside themselves, finding the interfaces between body and music, biology and sound... The project will this year encourage participants to imagine biology as sonic system, sound in its bodily effects, and otherwise connect embodiment to physical reality... As CTM puts it, they will navigate 'the spectrum between bio-acoustics, field recordings, ambient, flicker, brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, biofeedback, psychoacoustics, neo-psychedelia, hypnotic repetition, noise, and sub-bass vibrations' to both address and disturb the body." 
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