Artemis II Wisdom

I was quite moved by NASA's recent Artemis II mission. Here are some great quotes from the crew of the lunar fly-by:

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover show a photo of Earth taken just moments
after the Orion spacecraft ignited its thrusters for a final burn for 8 seconds, producing a change
in velocity of 4.2 feet-per-second and pushing Artemis II toward Earth. | Photo: NASA

"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."

“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”

"To all of you on Earth, and around the Earth ... we love you, from the moon."

"You can see the surface of the Moon ... we just went sci fi."

"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."

"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."

“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.”

"I said that we do not leave Earth, but we choose it. And that is true."

"Christina has been sleeping head down in the middle of the vehicle, kind of like a bat"

"It's really fun to be floatin' around, it just makes me feel like a little kid."

"Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful."

"'Homo Sapiens' is all of us, no matter where you're from or what you look like. We're all one people."

"I'm proud to call myself the Space Plumber."

"I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me but there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth: You are a crew."

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

To Evolve

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
--Aldous Huxley

“That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
--Mary Oliver, from “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings”

“I don’t believe in perfection. I believe in evolution.”
--Dominique Crenn, from "Rebel Chef"

Words For These Times

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
--Aldous Huxley

AI imagery by Xander Steenbrugge for "Exotic Contents" by Max Cooper

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
--Carl Sagan

AI imagery by Xander Steenbrugge for "Exotic Contents" by Max Cooper

“Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.”
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

It's Time For A Perspective Shift

“Time is tricky. You have whole months, even years, when nothing changes a speck, when you don’t go anywhere or do anything or think one new thought. And then you can get hit with a day, or an hour, or a half a second when so much happens it’s almost like you got born all over again into some brand-new person you for damn sure never expected to meet.”
--E.R. Frank, Life Is Funny

“You see the beauty inside everything. It doesn’t last long—it’s either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it’s something so big that you normally can’t get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It’s probably like that all the time, but you just can’t see it, except for those little glimpses.”
--Janet Fitch, Paint It Black

“I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”
--Jonathan Safran Foer

Memory and Understanding

“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”
--Alain de Botton

"3:42 p.m., 2010" | Photo by Alexander Harding

“The path isn't a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
--Barry H. Gillespie

Who Are You And What Will You Do?

"Life is so short you can’t waste even a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do versus knowing what you can do."
--Virgil Abloh

"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
--James Baldwin

"Your life’s a nanosecond; if you have a contribution to make, then make it. Don’t bitch about it, just do it."
--Richard Serra

I Miss My Mom

"Grief is the price we pay for love."
--Queen Elizabeth II

Who You Are Can Always Be Seen

“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Everything that irritates us about others is what leads us to an understanding of ourselves.”
--CG Jung

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”
--James D. Miles

What It's Like To Get Old

“Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.”
--David Lynch

“I love getting older. My understanding deepens. I can see what connects, I can weave stories of experience and apply them. I can integrate the lessons. Things simply become more and more fascinating. Beauty reveals itself in thousands of forms.”
--Victoria Erickson

https://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/
https://www.victoriaerickson.com/

"Exotic Contents" by Max Cooper

Avant garde composer/musician and visual artist Max Cooper (previously here) collaborated with Machine Learning and AI Researcher Xander Steenbrugge on his most recent track "Exotic Contents." The results are hypnotizing but the concepts described by Cooper and Steenbrugge are utterly fascinating.

Max Cooper:

I have been exploring the difficulties of communicating with words as part of my new Unspoken Words album project. I was thinking about how to visualise the idea, and started chatting to artist and machine learning specialist Xander Steenbrugge about a system for converting words to visual stories. The idea was to take the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tackled this question of the difficulties of using words to explain our selves and our place in the world, and to have the AI system re-interpret these writings in visual form, making a direct visual representation of the Unspoken Words album concept.

It's interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, and the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven't really taken it all in yet, I feel like there's more to discover in it than I can appreciate. The system has a lot more potential too, we will be running a version where you can have your own words turned into visuals and music as well, keep an eye out on my socials and mailers for that if you'd like to get involved.

The music was a similar departure from my usual interpretation of ideas, where I applied a half time drum and bass format with more aggression and sharpness of sound design. It’s a club track, but for me, an exotic form of club track. The name came from Wittgenstein’s private language argument, and the difficulty of communicating an entirely internal, subjective object to others when we can never directly show the object to each other. He uses the analogy of a beetle in a box, and I refer to the idea instead as our exotic contents.

Xander Steenbrugge:

From the very start of this collaboration, Max and myself were very eager to leverage the latest advances in AI to directly visualize language through the mind of the machine. For the past few months, in fact, I've been exploring this approach using a combination of two machine learning models: a generative system called VQGAN, which can generate pixels starting from a blank canvas, and a perceptual system called CLIP that guides this generator by scoring how well the generated imagery matches a given language prompt. Through this feedback loop, the system can be used to directly convert language into the visual domain.

After an early phase of experimentation with this technique, we quickly settled on Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a great narrative for this technique as it deals directly with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the limits of science.

This final video then, is a direct visualisation of many of the statements posed by Wittgenstein in his seminal work, as interpreted by the AI.

Here you can find some examples of the timestamps and corresponding language prompts used to create the visual narrative:

0:00 "The world is everything that is the case"
0:16 "Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same"
0:29 "I am my world"
0:41 "According to Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
0:52 Tractatus quotes
1:00 "The picture is a model of reality"
1:26 "Objects form the substance of the world."
1:42 Tractatus quotes
1:56 "The picture is a model of reality"
2:10 "A name is a primitive sign"
2:23 "What can be shown cannot be said"
2:38 "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical"
3:19 Tractatus quotes
5:15 "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
5:20 "The world is everything, I am my world"

https://maxcooper.net/exotic-contents

Something to consider...

Stoic Mike (previously here) tells it like it is.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNG9LfUJXhM/

http://ithoughtso.net/

Truth, Again

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organised; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organise a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallised; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."
--Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear."

--Jiddu Krishnamurti

https://jkrishnamurti.org/

In the dream world...

As a lifelong dreamer, who has kept a dream journal since I was thirteen and studied Jungian dream analysis, this is particularly poignant...

By Michael Lipsey, previously here.

https://stoicmike.tumblr.com/
http://ithoughtso.net/

MLK Day 2021

The Wisdom of Jiddu Krishnamurti

https://jkrishnamurti.org/

The Experience

“You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”
--Albert Camus

“In Zen, we don’t find the answers; we lose the questions.”
--Zen saying

More Reasons

 If you need more reasons, here they are...thanks to Robert Reich for pointing it all out so succinctly.

PROTECT THE UNITED STATES AND DEMOCRACY.

VOTE THEM ALL OUT.

Liberalism Is The Enemy Of Tyrants

Wading Through Time

“The years teach what the days never know.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.”
--John Green, in his book LOOKING FOR ALASKA

Dwight Is Right

He seems to be speaking directly to 2020...

I like Ike.

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/dwight-d-eisenhower/