“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
—Anaïs Nin.
May 2011
9 posts
Lonely Planets
Free-floating planets had been predicted but now have finally been detected. Jupiter-sized planets float alone in the dark of space, without orbiting a star at all. Astronomers have discovered up to ten of these so called orphan planets while scanning the center of the Milky Way.
They are around 20.000 light years from Earth. Scientists estimate that there may be about as many of them as stars what make them as common as the orbiting planets we know.
“There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?”
—Umberto Eco, for The Guardian Books.
Quantum Entanglement
Jonathan Keats, once described as ‘a poet of ideas’ by the New Yorker, is about to pioneer nuptial quantum entanglement at Art Currents Institute. According to quantum mechanics, when two or more particles are entangled, they behave as if they were one and the same. Any change to one instantaneously and identically changes those entangle with it, even if they are a universe apart. Extreme romance, isn’t it?
In the picture: Particle tracks. wiki.brown.edu
The procedures are, technologically, as follows: the equipment is placed near a window where, exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal entangles photons. Pairs of these are divided by prisms. The photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of the couple, entangling them in a quantum wedding. Mr. Keats, who is happily entangled with his wife, says that ‘it is even easier than getting an x-ray’. Paperwork is not required either.
The entanglement will have to be taken on faith because any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it.
A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it. Nuptial entanglement is a state of belief.
“Marshall McLuhan was a master of pattern recognition.”
—Writer and artist Douglas Coupland in his new book ‘McLuhan: you know nothing of my work!’
April 2011
16 posts
Tractatus Digito-Philosophicus →
hxa.name
Described by authors as “an odd venture: a translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into the domain of software development”.
The software intellect – its basic conceptual forms – is rooted in the early 20th century, the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. That is where the work of Church and Turing, lambda calculus and computability, comes from. And it is also the time of the Vienna Circle, logical positivism, and Wittgenstein’s early work, the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’
tin:tank is about inspiration, brains and dreams. The atom, the network, the Cosmos. Creativity, insights and discoveries
2080: A Golden Age of Informational Fluidity
An excerpt from an article at McSweeney’s, ‘The Future of books’, by author James Warner, whose new book ‘All Her Father’s Guns’ has recently been published:
For the benefit of those people at future-of-publishing panels—there’s always one, for some reason—who insist it’s really not about the text but the smell of the book, books will by this time be available exclusively as lines of fragrances. Subsequently, humans will modify themselves into a species with a powerful olfactory sense, able to read underwater by decoding strings of pheronomes. Aroma-bibliography will triumph, as vast epics are composed for newly developed scent receptors, transforming the rising seas into a giant bath of community-assisted transmedia content. Also around this time, the oral literature of dolphins will be deciphered and will turn out, inexplicably, to be all about vampires.
“Technology is a cosmic force”
—This is an idea by Kevin Kelly, stated in his awsome book ‘What technology wants’. He believes that technology (The Technium) is the 7th kingdom of life. To have a proper understanding of technology, we need the same metaphors we are using to understand biology.
tin:tank is about contemporary thinking
Contemporary thinking is not narrowed to the field of philosophy anymore. In fact, it has been expanded to a mishmash of polluted knowledge and heterogenous inspiration from sources of any kind. The Internet is an ocean of wit and wisdom and I would like tin:tank to be a cheery seaside where creativity uploads and reloads.
I started tin:tank a couple of years ago as a website about articles on art, media, science, power, technology, identity, the network society and so on, which I craftly translated into Spanish. I am curating here this quicker version, full of fresh links and pickings, mainly in English and tuned with the times.
