Merry Christmas

I have not been posting as much as normal for various reasons. However, I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone (Christian, agnostic, indifferent, Orthodox) a Merry Christmas.

This blog does not power itself. It is motivated by the fact that you, dear reader, by your interest, provide sustenance and motivation. I thank all of you for your visits, your comments, and feedback.

Take care of yourselves. Be nice to those close to you – even strangers. Keep your pencils (and your minds) sharp, and your hearts open (if only just a little).

– Matt

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Ankle Update

I can walk!

(slowly)

I can descend staircases!

(with the grace of an 80-year-old man)

Yes, two days of rest, ice, and bandaging has done me some good. That said, I’m falling behind on my “May” series, due to the need to scan slides in order to help tell the story. Hope to have that up by the end of the week (he says, in June).

I’d like to point out a couple of additions to the blog:

    1. The Euro 2008 news thingy on the side is a temporary widget to provide updates on the travails of Holland’s (most likely short-lived) run for the cup. During the Euro, this will not (I repeat, not) become a football blog.

 

  • I’ve added a few new links to the “Relevant Blogs” section (down on the right). Please check out the other sites – you will not be disappointed. Actually, you could be disappointed; I don’t pretend to understand you.

 

As you were…

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Scribbled Notes on the Importance of Provocation

“Great art has dreadful manners…”

– Simon Shama

“It is important to have this idea in one’s mind, because otherwise one fails to grasp the whole spirit of modern Science-Philosophy. It does not aim at Truth; it does not conceive of Truth (in any ordinary sense of the word) as possible; it aims at maximum convenience.”

– Aleister Crowley

The enemy of philosophy is comfort, whether it be the philosophy of Art, Science, or Religion. I believe the aim should be truth seeking and its inevitable provocations, knowing that the process of seeking is fraught with necessary kludges and haphazard experimentation.

Knowledge is painful. Moving forward requires muscles, and muscles require exercise to stay useful. Tango dancers are not born, they practise themselves into being.

In the West, with the rise of the middle class after the Second World War, we increasingly have seen our lives surrounded – nay swaddled – in easy-to-access comforts: emotional, intellectual, spiritual.

Youths strictly consider university and college as a direct line toward employment and the beginning of their professional lives; the knowledge and the knowledge seeking of those institutions reduced to a utilitarian concept for sake of securing a Degree. When you graduate, it’s all about your career, which becomes tied to money with the paying of debts, the purchasing of cars and houses, the investments for retirement. Along this linear path, comforts are sought to take our minds off this linearity; these comforts do not refute linearity but provide means to make the linearity easier. The lawnmower, for example.

And if one day, a biologist or a philosopher writes something which reiterates the natural chaos of our human lives, we frown and ignore it. Some of us will demand our money back (whether possible or not) and walk away in a huff to their air-conditioned livingroom/car.

Again, the seeking of truth leads to conceptual provocation and whatever truths we manage to unearth often come without directions for usage. But I will accept the kludges, the orphaned questions begging at the back of my head, if I feel that it brings us one step closer to knowing more about nature and human existence.

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I swear…

If there’s one thing I find annoying about blogs, it’s the “non-entries”. You know, the “I’ve been really busy due to (x). Sorry I haven’t been updating regularly.”. In other words, they’re writing to say that they haven’t been writing, and furthermore they have nothing to say, other than the obvious.

But true to form, I find myself in the same situation.

Oh, I have excuses. I can’t scan slides currently because the scanner is cursed (I swear), so I can’t post photos. Work is killing me (slowly). My phone won’t stop ringing with “life-and-death” (work-related) emergencies. I tripped on the sidewalk and lost my homework…etc.

So yes, I too have nothing to say, other than a little soft-shoe routine to overstate the obvious, and some empty-sounding promises.

Give me some time, and I’ll be a posting fiend once again.

Regards,

Management

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This Month’s Poll

I occasionally use the poll feature on Blogger. It amuses me. However, this month, I thought I would submit a question that I’ve been considering for a while. Ever since the inception of imaginary magnitude, I’ve used the pseudonym “Apostata” (which derives from Julian the Apostate). I chose to obscure my identity in order for me to say certain things about certain places/things with, well, impunity. Thing is, if I am critical at times it’s not without reason and I’m not being abusive or unduly disrespectful. In other words, I wonder if I should be “me”.

Of course, not being one who subscribes to referendum politics, how you vote may not in the end reflect my decision, but I do appreciate your feedback. I’ll have an answer to this question in February – stay tuned.

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