Carter Emmart demos a 3D atlas of the universe

I thought this worthwhile posting to my blog. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Philip K. Dick

I love the stories written by Philip K. Dick. But then I tend to love most sci-fi, sometimes even the really tedious--nerdy stuff (PKD's works fall into this category). Here is a brief excerpt from the official biography web site, written by Laurence Sutin.

On the Edge of Eternity

...Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

--Lawrence Sutin is the author of "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" and "A Postcard Memoir". He edited the Philip K. Dick collection "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings". and "In the Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis."


The link:

http://www.philipkdick.com/new_ex-thevictory.html

Personality Tests and Brain Games (to make you smarter)

Here is a myriad of personality tests. I'm sure there are more out there, but I found this site, which has Google ads but a comprehensive list of personality and every other kind of test you can think to take:

http://similarminds.com/

http://www.lumosity.com/

Becoming a Student at 51!

I have returned to school. It's scary, and a shocking revelation to discover you actually remember stuff you learned in elementary school. Math 020, which is where I placed, is nothing better than a foggy recollection of gibberish concepts, but still I managed to do well on tests. How can that be? We [humans] have l-o-n-g memories apparently. It's still all very foggy, to me. And being the oldest, generally, is kind of a humbling experience -- but I try not to think about that too much. I'm enjoying the ride (all the cool stuff you learn).

I really REALLY appreciate good teachers. Teaching can't be easy.

What I didn't know I knew - list:

• how to find the circumference, radius and diameter of a circle
• all about absolute numbers (more than I can imagine one needs to know!) :-)
• Pythagorean Theorem
• Irrational numbers
  

  Interesting fact: Apparently Hippasus (one of Pythagoras' students) discovered irrational numbers when trying to represent the square root of 2 as a fraction (using geometry, it is thought). Instead he proved you couldn't write the square root of 2 as a fraction and so it was irrational.
  
  However Pythagoras could not accept the existence of irrational numbers, because he believed that all numbers had perfect values. But he could not disprove Hippasus' "irrational numbers" and so Hippasus was thrown overboard and drowned! -- quoted from the web page "mathisfun"
  

New stuff I learned - list:

• David Foster Wallace's commencement speech. You can read his commencement speech on the WSJ website: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
• How to twitter
• How films are made; and the music; and the scripts; and directing...
  
• Another cool essay by Bertrand Russel titled "What I have Lived For"

What I Have Lived For
(The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

---

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and was the co-author of Principia Mathematica.

Our English teacher cut up each section or sentence of this essay into separate pieces of paper, and then asked us to put these back together in the order they should be in, which was like solving a puzzle. I loved the exercise and Betrand Russell's essay!

So now I'm back to school. Maybe this time I'll finish.