Arquivo para April, 2018
Abandonment in the literature
16
Apr
The subject seems hidden in the literature, but it is not, I began to read 
the author’s Abandon trilogy Meg Cabot because there was reference to the myths of Hades and Persephone.
But the climate of excessive suspense, in my view of course, made me uninterested in the book and unlike many others that I return to and understand the author’s purpose, in this I did not do it. For those who do not know the mythology Persephone is Zeus’s daughter with Demeter, was a goddess concerned with picking flowers, and gradually when he grew up he enchanted the god Hades, lord of the dead who asked his daughter to marry him, but Demeter did not want them to get married .
They end up getting married, but Demeter asks Zeus to bring her back at the end of a complicated plot, Persephone ends up with a period with Hades, which is winter on Olympus, and a period with Demeter, which is spring in the realm of Greek gods. Anyway, the trilogy does not seem to me at the beginning any of this, it was just a “cult” touch.
Another more realistic book caught my attention, I find the Italian author Elena Ferrante, who has been writing since January in The Guardian, about family, childhood, gender and aging.
While I was waiting for a friend in a bookstore in Lisbon, I began to leaf through the book “Days of Abandonment” by Elena Ferrante, which tells the story (I do not know if it is true) of Olga, who is abandoned by Mario and finds herself trapped in a shattered daily life with two children, a dog and no job, but will fight against the feeling of a poor abandoned woman. I did not go to the end, of course, and I did not buy the book to resist the temptation to deviate from my compulsory readings, which at this moment are many and the pile is huge, I quickly saw on the Internet that 90% of the people who read it liked it.
Your book “A genial friend” is going to the TVs, in Portugal there will be a series.
Phantasmagoric and realism
13
Apr
Undoubtedly, reality may not only be what our senses
indicate, but also the senses are part of a good discovery of reality, one can use a glasses, a microscope and a powerful telescope to see reality, but using the eye.
What is difficult to imagine is how constructing narratives can deceive reality, can make it different from what the simple vision indicates, for example, it could be imagined that quantum physics would give rise to a called the “physical world”.
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen; three eminent physicists at the time, wrote an article that counterposed the idea of quantum physics, that quanta occupied a space between “pulses” and that there was nothing between them, they said three physicists was a “phantasmagoric” distance action and mathematically proved to be something impossible, the phenomenon became known as EPR (initial letters of the authors).
Recently, in a study led by Ronald Hanson and published in Nature magazine in 2015, the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported having done an experiment which, according to them, proves one of the most fundamental assumptions of quantum theory – that separate objects by a great distance can affect one to other.
The apparitions of Jesus, in various events, after his departure and resurrection brought astonishment and even fear to his disciples, in a little known passage appears to several people and says (Lk 24: 38-39): “Why are you worried, and Why do you have doubts in your heart? See my hands and my feet: it is I myself! Touch me and see! A ghost has no flesh, no bones, as you see I have, ”
Unfortunately he is still a ghost and even a legend to many.
The real (im)possibilities
12
Apr
In addition to contemporary idealistic thinking, I surrender to the fact that part of it started from religious
presuppositions attached to mechanicism and the order of the universe, there is a set of possibilities that have long been thought of, and some proven, as we have previously posed quantum physics and the real possibilities of science.
In The Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku, who has a famous book on hyperspace, uses an unexpected feature, the idea that in all religions there are other dimensions of life, he wrote: “The church believed in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Buddhists have Nirvana and various states of consciousness. And the Hindus have thousands of planes of existence “(p.236), they do not know but could be quoted the cosmogonies of various cultures and religions where orality prevailed and many of these tales speak of other dimensions.
The author acknowledges that in literature there are at least three types of parallel universes: hyperspace, or higher order dimensions, the multiverse (nonuniversity), and the quantum parallel universes.
The fact that we are attached to the three dimensions, clarifies the author comes from Aristotle, that his work On the sky, established the width, height and depth, which are translated into three ideal dimensions: the point, the straight and the plane, which are inexistent if examined in the real nature, the fractals are a modern rediscovery (a monk had already conjectured) of the rupture of these dimensions to the one natural plane, is the natural fractional, where dimensions 0.7 or 2.78 exist.
The author says that Carl Gauss had already conjectured these dimensions, but it was a pupil of his that overthrew with a simple example this theory idealista supposing a sphere, in her the minimum distance between two points is an arc and not a straight, and a triangle will have more of 180 degrees in the sum of the angles.
For the fourth dimension, it is a surprising feature of art historian Linda Darymple Henderson who wrote: “Like the black hole, the ‘fourth dimension’ had mysterious characteristics that could not be fully understood, not even by the scientists themselves . “(P. 238), recognizing the importance of this theory.
He also cites Salvador Dali’s picture Christus Hypercubius (stylized image above), he is “crucified before a strange and hovering trimester cross that is a reality in” tesseract “, a four-dimensional cube unfolded” (page 238)
Movies like “Contact” made from the novel by Carl Sagan and “Interestellar” where ships travel in the fourth dimension, wormholes may already be virtually possible, a project that has more than 100 million dollars, was launched in England in 2016 and has Stephen Hawking’s support, could micro-ships travel in this dimension?
The future will still bring surprise and there will be no shortage of false prophets succeeding against i
The (im) possible future of mankind
11
Apr
He criticizes the part of the technoprofetas, it is possible to make speculations, in the field of hypotheses, therefore,
on the future of humanity, this is the most recent book of Michio Kaku, where he explores in rich details of physical and theoretical possibilities how humanity can, in gradual steps and certainly looked at by ethical committees, to develop a sustainable civilization in outer space.
It is necessary to take a few steps back and see how much we have already achieved by reading another book of this renowned physicist and someone who goes in the field of hypotheses with fundamentals and theoretical basis for speculation.
The book “ The Physics of the Impossible” in his 2008 book, Good Portuguese Translation by the Bizâncio Editorial, shows in what field is physics, the advances already known and the promised ones. After going through the great physicists of the nineteenth century, James Maxwell, who questioned the fact that magnetic fields can become electric and vice versa in a clear discontinuity, and go to the possibilities of invisibility based on nanotechnology of metamaterials, it falls in reality and says: “most nanotechnology machines are nothing more than toys.” (page 51)
Kaku’s second quest is teleportation, Einstein’s famous article, in which he and other colleagues test the phenomenon of quanta teleporting without going through an intermediate stage, breaks with the Aristotelian principle to go from A to B through C intermediate, has been demonstrated in the last fifty years, despite the questionnaire of Einstein, Poldoslky and Rosen, reason why it became known as EPR phenomenon.
We have already posted on robots, now we want to talk about artificial intelligence, Kaku wrote: “The supreme irony is that machines can easily perform tasks that humans consider difficult, like multiplying large numbers or playing chess, but failed when asks them to do things that are extremely ‘easy’ for humans, such as walking in a room, recognizing faces, or chattering with a friend. ”
Take the speech from Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the founders of AI, who summed up the problem as follows: “The story of AI is funny, for the first real deeds were beautiful things, like a machine demonstrating logic or did well in a course of calculation. But then we started trying to make machines that could answer questions about the kinds of simple stories that are found in a book in the first year of elementary school. Today there is no machine that can achieve this “(p.131).
We will explore in the next post, (im) real possibilities, in Kaku’s view.
The false technoprofetes
10
Apr
The idea that the machine is evil, besides being an obvious anti-progress conception,
seeks without knowing them to disprove Kranzberg’s first law: technology is not good, neither bad nor neutral, but in general, its other 5 laws: 2nd – invention is the mother of need, 3 th technology is developed in “packages”, 4th technological policies are decided, based on non-technical criteria, 5 th. – all history is important, but the History of Technology is the most relevant area, and, 6th. – Technology is a human activity, the History of Technology as well.
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, in his book “The Myth of Singularity: Should We Fear Artificial Intelligence?” (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2018) unmasks the idea that in the foreseeable future, some mark the year 2045 as machines can come forever completely autonomous and replace the human intelligence that ultimately is what programs and governs.
He quotes among several others who believe in this prophecy, whose point of overcoming is called the point of singularity, Raymond Kurzweil, that part of his precocious genius, at the age of 15 wrote a program that scores piano music, prepares his body and his mind to be “Loaded” (a cybernetic download) on a future machine.
Another technoprofetes quoted by Ganascia is Hans Moravec, who wrote “Men and Robots: The Future of Human Intelligence and Robotics” (1988) and “Robot: More Machines to Transcendent Mind” (1998) that would lead to a radical transformation of humanity.
One last, quoting quote, Kevin Warwick wrote I, Cyborg in a clear allusion to Eu, Robot, and who became known to the public for introducing a chip encapsulated in a skin into the skin to command a series of actuators remote, but it seems that his project was a failure, says Ganasci (page 13).
Philosophers do not stand still, I leave aside here the critics of the current digital technologies, to go to futurist technoprofetas, worthy of mention and quoted by Ganascia, Nick Bostrom, training physicist, makes prophecies in his writings, and particularly a sales success :
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, predicting among other things the trans-humanity.
Among the catastrophic technoprofetes, Ganascia quotes Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who wrote an article: “Why the future does not need us,” the author goes from Leibniz to Lyotard to show why these theses seem real in our time , but not in the studies and results of Artificial Intelligence.
They are indeed technoprocesses, but out of time, the time of oracles and prophets is of orality.
The (in) visible relations and networks
09
Apr
One of the issues in focus today is social networks, they are not
of today, the problem is that today they are in evidence, but they continue to keep certain aspects of invisibility, confused with virtuality, make a historical analysis.
The networks of commerce in antiquity, by sea and by land, the invisible colleges, defined by Solla Price in her work “The development of science: historical, philosophical, sociological and economic analysis” of 1976 (in Brazilian edition), calls the scientific networks of collaborative networks, where researchers communicate, exchange information and experiences, means that even in the absence, through printed works and conferences, authors collaborate.
Essentially, a network is a web of nodes and links between nodes, although these participants are autonomous, the consequences of network connections can exceed their own limits by connecting to “out” through weak links. In the analysis of networks can be identified only for didactic reasons, three types: ego networking, global networking networks and networks of actors relationships, called TAN (Theory Actor-Network) with origin in the works of Michel Callon.
Airport networks, container transport networks around the world, Global networks are strongly influenced by the media, and they create a certain amount of invisibility, since the collaborative networks of publications are also called invisible colleges by authors like Solla Price, but accelerated by the speed of the media, electronic media is larger speed of publication and communication that prints it, then blog, twitter and the social media media like Facebook occupy a new role at the present time, but are not in themselves networks, but networks media.
Several measures can be thought of, the centrality of closeness of an actor measures how close a node is to all others, the greater the proximity measure, the intermediation betweenness measures the importance of a node in the circulation of information. So, for information effect, betweenness is the measure of control that an actor holds in the flow of information and closeness is the facility that an actor has of access to information.
The invisibility, emphasizing present in the “invisible” colleges in modernity, is relative to the process of communication and information that can go beyond the actor actors along the network, virtuality in turn refers to the potentiality of increasing the capacity of the network
See and believe: feeling the real
06
Apr
Contrary to common sense thinking, the virtual does not oppose
the real, but it points to a path, digital technologies already under development as augmented reality, virtual reality and holograms are virtual not in the sense of unreality, but of potentialities. What may come out of them still depends on some technological advances, but the development of these artifacts, such as to create 3D holograms tested at Brigham Young
Researchers of Bringham Young University (see our post) published in the January issue of Nature, will still depend on technological advances to market in the near future, this is its virtuality. In an information society, reading plays a central role, not incidentally it is linked to the printed artifact, the so-called Gutenberg Galaxy, however one can imagine that oral culture has little to do with it, or only compose with it , but this is not a fact.
Oral culture, seeing is linked to listening, may seem curious or strange in this culture is essential to listen, and speaking means a certain authority, were thus with the oracles, prophets and masters in Afro cultures, one must have the gift to tell in them the myths occupy a prominent place, that is why we develop here: seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not listen. It might be the opposite, if we think of photography, TV and the Cinema, but the so-called “society of the spectacle”, which Guy Debord defined the spectacle as the set of social relations mediated by the images, but these are only modern artifacts; cave paintings would then be what?
The line of analysis that although it criticizes seems more coherent is that of Paul Virilio, that the modern society walks with “speed” for the new media, and the dance and the theater would be the real resistances to this speed, But Virilio surrenders to the claim that technological innovations transform, modify, alter geographical space at all scales (local, national and global), does not say this, however, it is necessary to humanize them, and this process will be increasingly is inherent in these media. An example of oral culture is in Thomas’s famous passage, which is interpreted in the culture of information as saying that it is seeing to believe, it is wrong, it is to feel to believe, reread the passage of John 20: 25-27.
“Then the other disciples told him,” We have seen the Lord. “But Thomas said to them,” If I do not see the nail-mark in your hands, if I do not put my finger on the nail-marks, your side, I will not believe “…. and Jesus said, Put your finger here and look at my hands.”
Jesus appeared and asked that he also touch other passages Jesus appears and only when he speaks, and breaks bread is “seen,” modern man must touch and feel.
Seeing do not see
05
Apr
Listening already wrote here, is the fact of owning the hearing aid,
listening is something for mental processing. what you have heard, you can not do it without some attention and some knowledge, at least of the language in which you are listening.
I imagined in Portugal, that in all the Iberian Peninsula, had already seen in Spain, there is some culture linked to the vision, something similar to oral tradition, even more primitive, yes because the cave paintings are previous to writing and probably originating from oral culture .
I discover asking about the cultural importance of the Caldas da Rainha City, relatively close to Lisbon, the figure of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846-1905), inventor of Zé-Povinho (in certain sense: little person), also a journalist of the engraving, a pencil leaflet, a graphic chronicler, a failed ceramista, cartoonist, ahed of time, Republican (in Portugal it happen in 1910), one of pionnering in satirical cartoons, and it may have convulsed his country in the late nineteenth century, still a monarchist, but already strong republican ideias. ,
His ceramics that did not avenge in his time, today are works of art spread in the interior world, in Brazil we have already seen those pots shaped like pine, cups (Portugal cups) and other crockery (utensils in the terrinha), made in format fruits and decoration, made much more like the “zé povinho” than the royal dishes of the Portuguese aristocracy.
Just as listening requires a training, the look requires a double training, because the artist wants to give the public something beyond the conventional and for this reason does this or that nuance in its artifacts,
Perhaps the very expression of Zé Povinho, also used in Brazil, owes to him, also here as here the expression can denote a pejorative sense.
The fact of the vision in the artistic sense, so much can resort to mythical figures, winged horses and onicorns, mule without head and saci Pererê in popular legends, with mystics in the sense even of anticipation of the reality, many artists were ahead of its time.
A visionary of our time can not refuse the media and social networks, being redundant, it is lack of vision.
They aren´t deaf but not listen
04
Apr
The physiological fact of listening can be in contrast with the
apprehension of the content in the human brain, that is, one can have a suitable hearing aid or even artifacts that help, but even listening, do not listen, that is, they do not apprehend the content.
McLuhan’s view that communication as a medium tends to be defined as transparent, innocuous, unable to determine what are the communicative contents that are conveyed.
Its only effect on the artifact, whatever it was, in the communication process would be negative, due to noises or obstacles in the delivery of the message, this was already the preoccupation as a device of Claude Shannon, but now McLuhan calls either the message made orally or in writing, be it transmitted by radio, television, puts in play new structures being artifacts intended to broaden the senses highlighting contours and other nuances of what is communicated, in this work relates to the artist who wishes to highlight something.
Put more directly, for McLuhan, the medium, the cane (terms more appropriate for Shannon), the technology artifacts that communication establishes, is not only a form of communication, but will ultimately determine the own content.
What McLuhan points out is the fact that a message delivered both orally as in writing, when broadcasting on the radio or television sets the content.
Their central thesis is that there is a double operation: 1) to study the evolution of the communal media used by men throughout their history, and 2) to identify the specific characteristics of each of these different media / communication artifacts .
These are two central points of his investigation that are at the root of one of his fundamental works, namely Understanding Media, of 1964.
Thus develops three galaxies, when only one is remembered, the Gutenberg Galaxy, which is typical of the written culture and then printed with the possibilities of reproducibility, but there is the oral or acoustic cultural that is previous, where the question of listening is fundamental (orally speaking), oracles and prophets occupy a central role, and the present one that McLuhan called electronic, but it is possible as an extension to speak of a digital galaxy in network, where there are media of networks that do not must be confused with the networks, since they exist in the previous galaxies.
So those who are trapped in the Gutenberg galaxy do not listen to oral culture, and those who are trapped in the culture of pure technology do not listen to oral and written culture
Ricardo Pereira or José Simão
03
Apr
Reading Ricardo Araújo Pereira, despite the common name
that in Portugal is almost names commons here, I discovered that he is José Simão (brazilian comics of Politics) from Portugal, but rarely appeals, there is only one “post”, I explained that what he writes could be a blog, but he would not make money, only one speaks of the word “f.” but then he ironically clarifies: “we are before someone who wants to say a bad word and can not – which proves that it is necessary to have training to be malformed”, then doing galhofa culpa the Ministry of Education and the portuguese the spell Checker of Computer.
But in the rest of the book he appeals little, although the whole book is a criticism of the grumblings of the new puritans and agelastas, subtitle of the book, I use to explain that “agelastas”, is that serious type that never laughs.
I remembered the title and the Ministry of Education when traveling with a very educated teacher, retired to 20 years and teacher of Portuguese and French, our equal to Brazil was chic to teach French here, when I asked of the use of two ces (they continue using ), she soon disversed and said she was concerned about education and people who read less and less.
He clarifies in one of the texts that what he writes is intended to make the readers read, although in a footnote says that this may be an irony, it is a kind of “mise en abyme” that in footnote says that can be found in the Wikipedia, of course another irony but it is there, used by André Gide to say of narratives that may have other inside them, at the foot of the letter “narrative in abyss”.
Ricardo Pereira, throughout the book goes quoting authors from Shakespeare to Lewis Carrol (his text Against political mariquice, where he speaks of the book Sylvie and Bruno where the crowd shouted: less bread plus taxes), passing by Cervantes, George Minois who wrote the “story of laughter and derision,” where Ricardo says it is written: “Laughter is too serious a matter to be left to the comics alone.”
But I was thinking almost at the end of this book, I need a bit of laughter, but maybe not the mockery, maybe this is the evil of Brazilian comedy, a lot of mockery, humorlessness, a lot of appeal, and what’s worse, we can only laugh at a certain party, the politically correct, so much for Dilma, she did have “celebrated” phrases.
Better than Trump quoted by Ricardo Pereira, who on being found an American drone in the sea of China wrote on twitter that it was a “fact without president”, to then correct for “unprecedented”, but I will not fail to mention José Simão who clarified that the big difference between the President of North Korea and Trump is “who has the most beautiful tuft”.
It is not alienation to laugh a little relaxes the tense environment not only national but worldwide, laughs the hills with a colleague of Portugal when saying that I have problems with their “paternity”.
But reading is important, I quote here another passage from Ricardo Pereira in which he ironizes Angola where citizens were arrested for reading books in English, I learned that there is this kind of reaction also in Cameroon and Ivory Coas, Shakespeare is dangerous writer, Oh my God.
