PCAPPC

We're all quite mad, and any one of us could be made ridiculous through exposure of our beliefs; and, under pressure to defend them, we could all be made quite dangerous. We get along because our public declarations of identity suffice in societies whose beliefs have been made conventional and secure through precedent. These public declarations include dress, language, common interests and aversions, and all the nuance we've learned to signal our fitness for one society or another. Once identified as fit, it's necessary to maintain our authenticity. But none of our identities are natural, no one is more authentic than another. We're comfortable in roles we've been practicing since birth, but they're roles just the same, parts we play, identities which we'll quickly discard in the absence of the societies they're suited for. World travel and cross-cultural experiences can seem to erase the pretense and leave our true nature exposed. But we adapt by playi...

Fuller described the "Jitterbug" transformation as the loss of the nucleus, causing the vertices to move closer to the center and creating the icosahedral shell. But if the vertices of the icosahedron are closer to the center than the vertices of the vector equilibrium, then why does it expand? The faces move closer together, but the vector equilibrium and the dodecahedron occupy the same, minimal, amount of space, and it's the icosahedron that occupies the most space. If Bucky didn't know this, it's surprising. But he didn't have access to 3D computer software. He only had his physical models. From an isotropic perspective, the vector equilibrium does, indeed, appear to shrink during its transition into an icosahedron. Jitterbug in VE phase -- Isotropic Jitterbug in Icosahedron phase -- Isotropic But from other perspectives, it's obvious that the icosahedron phase is the point of maximum expansion. Jitterbug in VE phase -- parallel p...

The Greek word, “geo”, like the Germanic word, “earth”, probably meant the hard, flat surface, the dirt and rocks beneath the dome of the heavens. The Greek “cosmos”, the German “world,” and the Latin word from which “ecumenical” originates, were words for the inhabited earth, the ordered and rational which we'd managed to wrestle from the unconscious void, the chaos beyond our borders. Geometry is a Roman word, not a Greek one, and they used it to mean the measure of the civilized world, the boundaries and boxes, the walls behind which order was maintained and preserved. Pythagoras didn't have a word for geometry. Instead, he used the words for number from which “arithmetic” originates, and learning , which was the original meaning of “mathematics”. Ancient Greece had no use for geometry in the Roman sense. Their domain was a cosmos of water surrounding islands which each functioned as independent worlds. “Cosmos” comes from the Greek, and the Romans seemed to have little...

Our neurology rewards us for relinquishing control, and we're punished for resisting. Survival requires the group be favored over the individual, but consciousness isn't easily assimilated. If in childhood the culture is unambiguous and stable, our world view is naturally entangled with the group's and we're easily indoctrinated. The same easy assimilation can occur when we're raised to be multicultural. But when the cultures are in conflict, the legitimacy of them all is questioned, and we grow up to be skeptics, believers in nothing, resistant to assimilation. We're not alone, as John Lennon noted, but we are isolated.

Are psychopaths autonomous agents of their personal ambitions? Are they thoroughly independent of the identities which the rest of us, as tame as sheep, have adopted without question?  The question is rhetorical because the answer is unquestionably, No. If anything, the psychopath is the very archetype of group identity. He or she embodies the culture, the country, or the creed, without suffering the inconvenience of an individual conscience or the indignity of doubt.  Sociopaths, on the other hand, disregard group identification and construct their own, idiosyncratic and narcissistic identities. Whatever family or tribe a sociopath might recognize would be synonymous with a cult, home-schooled and incestuous. At best, the sociopath is a critic of the psychopath's unwavering defense of empire, while the psychopath is, at best, the charismatic leader of a broadly unifying ideological identity (racial, religious, national, economic, etc.), and a critic of those cultist id...

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Adams When I pulled the quote from my Google home page I'd read the author as Henry James . I've never heard of Henry Adams. They say he was an historian, author and autobiographer. What does that mean, autobiographer? Writing one's own biography isn't usually thought of as a vocation. One book does not a career make. Maybe he was a ghost writer for other people's autobiographies, something common today among celebrities and politicians but I'd be surprised to learn it was common in the late nineteenth century. Anyway, I liked the combination of metaphors: slippery words and viscous thoughts. Alone, each is less powerful. Together, the slippery words are more dangerous and the viscous thoughts a more serious threat. Together, we feel a viscous mind losing control on the slippery surface of language. Thrilling, with ill in its middle. So little of ...

The 1957 Belvedere they pulled out of a time capsule Friday in Tulsa looks like it found the nuclear war they put it there to avoid. It would've been better off in somebody's car port. You'd think that with 3000 years of experience preserving the dead for the afterlife and the hundreds of years we've had to learn what conditions were necessary for the artifacts we've uncovered to have been preserved for a thousand or more years, that the civic boosters in Tulsa could've have found an archivist more qualified than the engineer who designed the zip-lock bag, and a solution less ridiculous than a concrete vault under a foot of dirt and grass saturated year-round by rain and automated sprinklers. It's symbolic of America's legacy, a glimpse into the history books of the future and what the United States of America is going to look like to schoolchildren years, centuries, millennia (should we be so lucky) hence: arrogant, ignorant and wasteful; or, more like...